Claire Hughes Johnson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's like everyone's product manager., They're like a VP of product potential and it's like product manager. What's the rationale behind that? I guess, and what's the benefit of that? But, we don't have to go too far down the road. I'm just curious. So this is something that Patrick and I actually really agreed on without a lot of discussion, which is not always the case. It has to do with a combination of optionality as you scale and grow, and also culture, right? And so the minute you start titling a lot, you're signaling hierarchy and authority. And the culture piece to Stripe still today, which is I think we could use more, at least more overt trappings of structure because it can get confusing. And I'll be the first to tell you that, and I admit that this might have carried on too far. But early on, at Stripe, there's a real belief. It's not a particularly hierarchical company. And if you're the person who has the knowledge, you are the expert on the thing, you better be, one, in the room helping make the decision, and two, driving, helping to drive the decision. And I don't care how senior you are, right? And that was the cultural signal that was important, which was about mutual ownership, and also expertise not sitting in hierarchy. And then the optionality thing is probably a little more obvious, which is don't make somebody the CMO, or even the head of marketing, if you're marketing team is two people, right? Yeah, you might make the right choice, but two years later, your marketing team's probably going to be more than two people, say it's 20. And are you going to have to layer somebody or have too many titles? And then someone feels like they're losing something, right? It goes back to the levels and ladder saying, but it's worse because you've given something, and then you're sort of taking it away, and that's just not... Organizationally, you want more flexibility. Honestly, I'll say my final thing, which is I have a little bit of a knit where you meet a company. I get what's happened, which is in order to hire this person, they had to sort of say, "I'll make you the VP of sales or the VP of this," but the company's like 25 people and there's seven VPs. If you're a customer or you're evaluating it, you're kind of like, "Really?" It's a little incongruous with the scale. So we kind of more flexible. We had a lot of growth, head of this or growth lead. I know you're all about growth, Lenny. Well, we definitely took growth and find that very broadly. But the other thing I've said to people internally... Sorry, you can really get me going on this one. I bet you didn't think that. If you are a stripe and you're going out into the market, actually it speaks to the same thing, which is you're going and trying to sell to a customer who's a lot bigger than you. I'm not saying make up a title. Don't say you're the VP of sales, but you can be creative about how you represent your scope because you probably have really big scope because you're one of the only people helping to sell the product. And that will help you because a lot of more established mature companies are trying to do that hierarchy match, where "Well, bring your SVP because my SVP is coming to the meeting." sell the product. And that will help you because a lot of more established mature companies are trying to do that hierarchy match, where "Well, bring your SVP because my SVP is coming to the meeting." And we could be like, we don't really have that. It just gives you a little more selling flexibility too.…

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