David Singleton: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just two more questions before we get to our very exciting lightning round. One is just I feel like Stripe is incredibly good at planning and organizing, prioritizing. I know every inside, it's always not as beautiful as it may seem on the outside, but what have you learned? What has Stripe learned about planning and prioritizing that you think other companies might be missing? Yeah. Well it's funny you say that. I would say planning inside of Stripe does not get the highest net promoter score that you might imagine. I do think it is actually quite effective. By the way, the reason I think that planning, the way we do planning at Stripe doesn't always get the best internal rep is we have grown very rapidly. That means that almost every time we come back around to planning, we actually, and this is kind of a theme at Stripe, we think about a lot of the ways that we work internally from First principles. We will tend not to by default just pick a system off of the shelf that some other company has run or that we've used before. We'll think hard, considering what we are doing for our users. How should we do this? When we're thinking even first principles, we'll often go out and talk to a lot of other companies, and try to learn from their experience. It's actually something I've really appreciated and enjoyed at Stripe. A lot of the learning I've done here has come not only from folks that are at the company, but also talking to a bunch of folks that we have the privilege to work closely with because their business is building on Stripe, or they're a similar stage of scale to us. A good example of this is Amazon. Amazon is a Stripe user. Because we work with them, in my first couple of weeks at Stripe, I was actually able to meet with Charlie Bell, who then ran operations at Stripe. A lot of the things that, sorry, who then ran operations at Amazon. A lot of the things that we actually now do at Stripe have come from learning from that experience. It wasn't just, oh yeah, we'll take this thing cause Amazon did it, talk to him. Lots of other companies hard to learn. The point is we care about learning from others and then we apply it. Bringing this back to planning, because we tend to think a lot from first principles and we've been growing rapidly. The right planning process for us as a company has actually changed quite dramatically and quite significantly over the years. We do planning in a relatively deep way once a year, and then in a slightly lighter way halfway through the year. If you imagine doing someone once a year and you're growing rapidly, you're going to want to revisit exactly how you do it. I think for anyone who has the privilege of running the same planning process again and again, you can really iterate it and tune it. We've had to make more deliberate and more sweeping changes as we've gone along. There are a couple things at the core of how we do this. One is it's really important to focus on who are the users that we are seeking to serve for any given product area that we're working in? Kind of holding their needs front and center in your plans is important. Again, at Stripe, we do something that is, it's not unconventional, but it's not the most common practice in the industry, which is we work very hard to serve companies from the very, very small. ant. Again, at Stripe, we do something that is, it's not unconventional, but it's not the most common practice in the industry, which is we work very hard to serve companies from the very, very small. The folks that are literally just starting their company on Stripe, with Stripe Atlas, all the way up to multinational, 10 Fortune five companies, fortune one companies, I guess. There's a very different set of user needs across those businesses. For any given area, it's very important for each team to be clear about who are they serving. Then we run a kind of inverted W process. We typically have teams surface what their immediate thoughts are on the most important things to do. We'll then have a group of product leaders get together and try to synthesize the most important parts of that into a kind of draft overall company strategy, and then take that back down to teams to figure out, "Well, if that's where we're making a big push, should that tweak my plans at all?" We bring it back up for synthesis, and then back down for everyone to really distribute with a lot of context within their orgs. We find that at our current scale, very, very effective.…

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