Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe)

1. Cultivate Self-Awareness

Prioritize cultivating self-awareness, including understanding your motivators, strengths, blind spots, and tendencies. This is the most fundamental element for effective company building and management.

2. Actively Seek Feedback

Actively seek feedback about your motivators, strengths, blind spots, and tendencies, then take it on board and expose it to others. This practice enhances your effectiveness as a company builder and manager.

3. Define Core Personal Values

Identify your top three core personal values by narrowing down a list, and understand the formative stories behind why each value is important to you. Documenting these values and their origins aids in self-discovery and clarifies your operating principles.

4. Assess Work Style Tendencies

Use various work style assessments (e.g., Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram) to understand your tendencies, such as introversion/extroversion and task/people orientation. Plotting these alongside your values helps clarify your unique operating style and defaults.

5. Say the Unsayable Constructively

Practice saying difficult truths by detoxifying your internal commentary and framing observations as questions or personal perceptions, not judgments. Own your observations (e.g., “I feel like,” “I wonder if”) to make them less threatening and open a dialogue for shared understanding.

6. Foster Open Feedback Environment

Prioritize creating an environment of high trust where team members feel comfortable giving direct, even blunt, feedback to leaders. This open feedback loop is crucial for getting things done and improving performance.

7. Enable Team Performance

As a manager, shift your mindset from being the expert who tells people what to do to enabling your team members to perform at their best. Create an environment, context, and provide information and coaching to support their growth.

8. Coach with Hypothesis-Based Exploration

Adopt a coaching approach that’s exploratory and curious, rather than lecturing. Form a hypothesis based on some data or intuition about a team member’s work pattern, then explore it with them to collaboratively discover areas for improvement.

9. Provide Behavioral Feedback

Offer behavioral feedback by holding up a mirror, describing your personal experience or observation of someone’s actions (e.g., “my experience of you was…”). This helps individuals become aware of non-verbal cues or patterns they might unconsciously exhibit, prompting discussion on how to vocalize discomfort instead.

10. Be a Force for Momentum

Strive to be a force for positive momentum in your work, as this approach can significantly advance your career. Focus on progress and impact to drive forward motion.

11. Act as the Decision Maker

If you’re unsure who the decision maker is, assume it’s you and act accordingly to avoid slowing down the company. If you’re worried it’s not you, ask directly to prevent getting stuck and hindering progress.

12. Clarify Decision-Making Process

To overcome decision paralysis, explicitly define who is making a decision, the criteria, and who will be informed, using a chosen decision model (e.g., RACI). Evaluate the decision type (e.g., Bezos’s Type 1/Type 2) to determine its impact and reversibility, then follow the process to make it.

13. Run Explicit, Purposeful Meetings

Run more effective meetings by making the implicit explicit: clearly state the meeting’s objective (decision, information sharing), who needs to be there, and who is making the decision. Inquire if the meeting is truly necessary and if some attendees can be updated asynchronously.

14. Create Stability Through Rituals

In chaotic and ambiguous environments, actively create stability by establishing rituals and common practices (e.g., quarterly goals, planning cadence). These shared routines provide a predictable framework, preventing paralysis and further chaos.

15. Commit to Few Consistent Processes

Instead of constantly adopting new processes, commit to a few core operating practices and execute them consistently and well. This prevents a “grab bag” of ineffective systems and allows for annual revision rather than frequent, chaotic changes.

16. Don’t Let Perfect Be Enemy of Good

When implementing systems or processes, prioritize having a functional one and committing to it, rather than endlessly seeking perfection. Accept that there will be flaws and work around them, as striving for perfection can hinder progress.

17. Codify Mission, Goals, Principles

Create foundational documents like a clear mission statement, long-term goals (detailing why the company exists), and operating principles/values. These documents guide employee choices, ensure alignment, and help mutually match with candidates.

18. Document Answers to Common Questions

If new hires or employees frequently ask “what’s important?” or “why do we do it this way?”, it’s a clear sign to document and codify your company’s mission, goals, and processes. Writing things down crystallizes understanding for everyone.

19. Establish Core Operating Systems

Implement core operating systems including structured goal setting (e.g., annual targets, OKRs), regular business reviews (e.g., QBRs with templates), and clear metrics/dashboards. Additionally, commit to a planning process, even if imperfect, to measure progress against your strategic plan.

20. Customize Operating Cadence

Customize your operating cadence (e.g., for business reviews) to fit your company’s needs, rather than strictly adhering to traditional timeframes like quarterly. Adjust the frequency (e.g., to every six weeks for rapidly developing areas) to ensure predictability for teams and appropriate progress measurement.

21. Adjust Cadence Based on Progress

Adjust your operating cadence if reviews show insufficient progress (too fast) or stale content (too slow). Ensure there’s new, fresh content for each review to avoid creating unnecessary work and to keep discussions timely and relevant.

22. Avoid Overhead in Metrics Review

Be wary of creating overhead by thinking more frequent checks automatically increase speed; it can actually slow velocity. Instead, review live, real-time dashboards directly in meetings to avoid wasting time on preparing special presentations and ensure data is current and accessible.

23. Multi-Channel Communication Strategy

Develop a multi-channel communication strategy, recognizing that a single email or all-hands meeting is insufficient to reach everyone. Use different channels (e.g., intranet, newsletters, videos, Slack) and repeat key messages, similar to a marketer, to ensure broad understanding and alignment.

24. Leader as Repeater-in-Chief

Embrace the role of “repeater-in-chief” as a leader, consistently reiterating core messages and strategies across various channels. Repetition is essential for ensuring alignment and understanding within a scaling organization.

25. Utilize Offsites for Cohesion

Use offsites as a vehicle to pull people out of their daily routines, creating dedicated space for focused work, brainstorming, and group experiences. This helps imprint shared memories, cement belief systems or plans, and foster collective ownership of decisions.

26. Seek Knowledge from Others

Actively seek advice and help from others, especially those who have done similar things before, to gain valuable knowledge and accelerate your learning. Don’t hesitate to make phone calls and ask for insights from experienced individuals.

27. Implement Job Levels Early

Implement job levels and ladders earlier than you think necessary, even if it’s imperfect and challenging. Having a defined structure prevents unfairness in compensation and rewards, which can arise as the company grows.

28. Avoid Premature Senior Titles

Avoid giving out overly senior titles (e.g., CMO) too early when teams are small, as it limits organizational flexibility and can lead to resentment when restructuring is needed later. Maintain flexibility to prevent people from feeling like they’re losing something when new layers are added.

29. Creatively Represent Your Scope

When interacting with larger, more established companies, creatively represent your broad scope and responsibilities rather than inventing a senior title. This provides selling flexibility by matching their hierarchical expectations without over-titling internally.

30. Build the Company, Not Just Product

Once you hit product-market fit, shift focus to intentionally building the company’s operational and cultural structures, not just the product. Neglecting company building will prevent the product from scaling effectively.

31. Share Investor Story Internally

Share the company’s vision, problem, and early customer feedback (often used for investor pitches) internally with all hires. This foundational content helps guide choices and align employees.

32. Develop a Structured Hiring Process

Establish a structured hiring process early on, even pre-product-market fit, by defining talent needs, evaluation methods, and training interviewers. Interviewing is a learned skill, so provide rubrics and questions to improve candidate assessment.

33. Outsource to Scale Faster

Go faster on intuitions about using vendors and outsourcing parts of your model, especially when scaling rapidly. Push through the difficulty of integrating external contractors, even if internal tools and processes aren’t perfectly figured out yet.

34. COO Not Always Necessary

Recognize that a COO role is not an automatic or universally required hire for most companies, as fewer than 30% typically have one. Evaluate specific needs for leverage in high-growth or operationally intense environments rather than assuming it’s a default.

35. De-Risk COO Hiring

De-risk the COO hiring process by first bringing in a Head of Business Operations or a similar COO-like role to test their fit and scaling capabilities with a few functions. Alternatively, empower an operational CFO or a business ops leader to expand their scope, providing leverage without the full commitment of a COO title.

36. Foster Productive Tension

A fantastic COO-CEO relationship thrives on the right amount of productive tension, characterized by mutual understanding, trust, and the ability to challenge each other. This dynamic allows for both clear delegation and constructive friction, leading to outcomes greater than the sum of individual efforts.