David Singleton: preference

Transcript context

…Is there something that you found in this process that comes to mind that was really surprising or interesting or just kind of lasting in the past set of couple years? One of the most interesting things that I think I've run into is there are a lot of places that as we scale, we know that it makes a lot of sense to invest in automation and there were a bunch of places in our development process where while we've done that, we were working hard to help each other out and actually saying, hey, please come talk to this other team if you want to use this thing. And if you're working for instance, a different time zone from someone else, it's often the case that actually it would be much better just to document it well and automate it and then maybe make the consultation available. And so running into those kind of pieces of friction and then having a good conversation about it has really helped. But one good thing about Stripe I think is that kind of change doesn't depend on me doing anything. So we really care about making Stripe a place where engineers can do some of the best work of their careers and that means being enabled with good tools and good developer productivity. So we invest a lot in developer productivity. We have a team who work on our dev tools and they actually run exactly the same product development process that I just described for our external users internally. So understand your users really well. Talk to them a lot, as so for instance, we do a monthly survey. We operate in enough scale where we can ping enough people once a month that we get a statistically significant sample of the entire organization without having to get everyone to respond. Every individual respond once every six months. And we ask very directly, what's the experience you're having? And then we use that to prioritize the roadmap of our developer productivity team. We also measure everything so we know where people are getting stuck and when we compare both the kind of free responses and the data, it helps us invest in the best places to make everyone else more productive. Okay, that's exactly where I was hoping to go next. And let me set this question up. So I saw a tweet of yours recently where I have some notes here I'm going to read that you deploy changes to your core, API 16.4 times a day on average. Your uptime has been 99.999% and one in 10 people in the world have transacted with a business powered by Stripe at this point. And so my question is just what does it take to achieve something like this, especially in terms of tooling and culture and everything else you're just talking about?…

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