Jeff Weinstein: belief

Transcript context

…So I love where we're going with this. This is where I was going to actually talk about next is just your ability to talk to customers and user research. It feels very unique, watching you operate on Twitter, you're just sharing your email constantly, getting on calls with people constantly. There's this, you're breaking this wall between... That a lot of people imagine there is between the PM and the lead of a team and the customer. You're not relying easy research. You're not waiting for someone else to do this work for you. Talk about just why and how you do this. I think there's so much to learn from just how you operate in finding opportunities, picking problems to solve by talking to customers. It's where the business comes from is customers. It is not a long shot hypothesis about why to talk to them. It's like if they love your stuff, they will tell their friends and pay fair prices for the product. We're so fortunate through the internet that people announced themselves as being interested in a topic. Sometimes they're interested in it by posting on Reddit a long thread or a screenshot of a customer service interaction that bugged them or hopeful that from their dorm room in country X, someone else in the world has solved the same problem. And the internet has given us all this absolutely magical forum that you can just yell out the window and then billions of people could actually listen to what you said out the window. Now, that's not all the time true for all people in all situations, but dramatically more true now than ever before in human history. And so the fact that people wouldn't be listening to their customers and really jumping through the computer to talk to them surprises me. It's like I always sometimes think, "Do they have some other strategy? Are they so confident in what they're building that they don't need to hear directly from the people who will be using it?" And I think some of it is my own fear that I'm going to make the same mistake I've made in the past, which is build something that people like they're using but isn't solving a burning enough problem such that they're going to stop their day, they're going to tell their friends, we're going to be able to sustain the company economically over a long period of time. And that really just comes from hearing people's most burning problems and then just jumping through the computer and talking to them takes a little bit of nervous gumption, like walking up to a person at a bar or cocktail party and saying, "Hi, my name is Jeff." It can be a little awkward, but then you get it. It's a rush once it starts to work. And once you get the iterative loop that they're excited to talk to you, they have problems, they see you as a trusted, not salesy, not pitching, not narrow-minded to just my product and my position, but I'm here to hear about all of your problems and see where we can help. Not promising we can help solve everything, but let's listen. That is infectious, both between the customers and internally. And so I'm able to bring more people into that practice. At Stripe, I'm able to quickly grab an engineer and hop on a call. I can forward a message over to a Slack group. And they know that because the customer's speaking directly, it somewhat trumps everything that's happening during the day. We could go to our meeting where we're going to guess what the customer wants or we could talk to them directly. And you have to use a little bit of art to decide which customers you want to listen the closest to. o our meeting where we're going to guess what the customer wants or we could talk to them directly. And you have to use a little bit of art to decide which customers you want to listen the closest to. But even at Stripe's scale, where we're dealing with many millions of businesses and many hundreds of millions of consumers on the other end of those businesses, you can pattern match relatively quickly. What are the styles of customers that represent where the world is going, the most ambitious, the most technical, the fastest growing, the most detailed. And you don't need 10,000 of those people to talk to. If you're text message friendly with five or 10 of those, you are going to have so much direct signal about where to go that you forget how you did it in the past.…

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