Jeff Weinstein: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay, let's imagine we understand our customer, we've understand their burning problem. We've built a solution that's in their hands, they're using, it's hopefully better than their alternatives and they're starting to use it and we have some real traction. You could still measure the success, you could still look at the tweets and then, of course, you go to pick it up yourself and you're like, "Wait a second, this thing is horrible. How did it get so bad?" Anyone who's built a product that has gone over the horizon of it's actually in production and being used for a year or more as you go to iterate on it, especially when you're in a larger company and there's multiple teams and multiple products going on, there's just some entropy in the world that causes these things to go bad. I actually have a hard time naturally explaining it. You kind of think to yourself, well, it's code. It just must be running the same every day. But somehow you do enough things in a row. And what was once a smooth end-to-end flow for accomplishing a test or a customer is all of a sudden some Byzantine complicated broken mall where all the doors are busted and you have to know exactly the way to get through the dashboard to solve your problem. "Wait a second, I thought this was great just a second ago." And many of us have experienced that. Now, okay, what are we going to do about it? Well, one is it is really difficult to take time during the day to allow yourself to even know that this is true. Because if you're working on one particular team, you're going to have some next thing you're shipping, you're going to have your customers, you're going to be doing great product work. Meanwhile, your current thing kind of starts to rot in the world and decrease all the trust you've earned to build what you're building now. It is actually difficult to decide, well, what hours during the week am I going to block off from my future progress to see it from the customer's perspective today? And there are various techniques to try to incentivize or to structure a group of people to do that. Stripe has a thing called friction logs as well, which is a single individual will pretend to be a customer and go through a product experience end-to-end and write it down. And that has been quite successful at Stripe for very motivated people who can block off the time and have the wide enough context to do a complicated thing end-to-end and have the time to write it up and the position the company to send it out as a critique potentially to not just your own team but in a whole organization. So that's actually a pretty high bar to crossover. So I was kind of brainstorming what could we do to make this more fun and have the frequency which we're looking at our own products dramatically increase? And we kind of iterated few through ideas. And I landed on this thing called Study Group, which is basically a random group of people inside the company. They might not work on any particular team. e? And we kind of iterated few through ideas. And I landed on this thing called Study Group, which is basically a random group of people inside the company. They might not work on any particular team. They might not all be PMs, just like literally anyone who wants to sign up, a support person, a sales person, someone who's on our events team, an engineer and our infrastructure stack. Anybody can sign up for a Study Group. We show up maybe four to eight people total. We pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Maybe we want to accept money in person at an upcoming farmer's market, or we want to run a multi-country global business where we have software that another business would use to run their business. If it was something quite complicated. We could pick any motivating goal. And there are two rules to Study Group rule one is you do no longer work at Stripe. You do not work at Stripe, not pretend, don't work at Stripe, not try to forget you do not work at Stripe, you've never worked at Stripe. You work at... And we make up a name of the company, Dolphin Aquarium Industries, and we will pick a CEO of the company from the group amongst us. And okay, Jenny is the CEO. "Hey, Jenny, what do you want to do today?" "Well, I want to sell in-person tickets to the Dolphin Aquarium." It's like, "Cool, where would just start?" So we actually embody the customer. We will not break character, it's a little bit of the improv thing and as the kind of maestro of Study Group, I will firmly but kindly, if I hear you use any internal Stripe knowledge, which is natural to do, because, well, you worked on a team and you know where that button really is. And the docs link goes a little bit to the wrong place, but if you click the other link, you'll get to it. If I can see you use any internal Stripe knowledge, I'll just pause and say, "Hey, let's redo the sentence or redo what we did with no Stripe knowledge. As a reminder, you don't work at Stripe." And it takes us a couple of times, but people really get into it and all of a sudden we'll start making up characters and the CEO will be like, "Oh, Tim, you're our designer. Where are we going to get the color palette?" All of a sudden there's a person who's not a designer in real life is now all of a sudden having to practice the empathy to be in a customer's position. And because we're going to be doing it for an hour, hour and a half at a time, you actually start to believe that you don't work at Stripe and you work at Dolphin Aquarium Industries and you start to really feel it. So that's rule one. You don't work at Stripe. And rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. We're not here to critique, we're not here to solution or suggest, we're not here to file bugs. All of those things is recorded. We can do that later, whatever. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer and going through the product. And we have done more than 25 of these at Stripe thus far in just this year, last few months of 2024, more than 250 people have participated in the Study Group. And it is deeply eyeopening for those involved. ave done more than 25 of these at Stripe thus far in just this year, last few months of 2024, more than 250 people have participated in the Study Group. And it is deeply eyeopening for those involved. The responses are sort of business emotional, not super emotional, but just, "Wow, I can't believe how hard it was to accomplish X, Y and Z. I thought we were amazing at blah." It's like, "Well, we actually are still pretty good, but we need to get back towards amazing" or Wow, "I didn't even know that internally people wouldn't know that our products did 1, 2, and 3." And this has become so internally popular that teams have adopted for themselves. And so, we've kind of franchised Study Group internally already where different teams will run it. But I think we're going to continue it because I think a little bit is coming out of the pandemic. People just want more group activities. I think some of it is the slowness by which we do it. We're not rushing through it. Which another reason I appreciate your podcast as well is let's really get into the details and not be rushed for time. You forget that you have a meeting at the end kind of amount of time. No one is to blame or defensive because it's not your product at all. It's a random group of people. We don't even introduce ourselves about what team we worked on. We're just all here as participants to embody the customer. And then I think lastly, a reason why it's worked, and these are many of these just been actually super surprising to me. I wouldn't have been able to prick ahead of time, is it's just fun. People want to make up the name of the company. They're excited about what Dolphin Industries would sell. A person who's not a CTO in real life gets to pretend to be a CTO and there's little theatrics to it, but it has been different enough from our other approaches for a company like Stripe, which is already pretty focused on this topic, that we think that there's enough legs here that we're going to keep it and kind invest in groups pretending to be the customer and going through it painstakingly slowly rather than only demos or only writing, which has other benefits, but misses the participation of a larger group and more fresh eyes. So it's been fun and we named it Study Group. I guess, I named it Study Group because I wasn't sure it would be initially. So I just came up with something that sounded cutesy, but gave me enough leeway that we could kind of adjust it over time. And this is where we've landed.…

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