David Singleton: commitment

Transcript context

…Awesome. You run a massive engineering team. I don't know if you shared the numbers of engineers, but I know there are many. What are, and this is a broad question, just what are some lessons you've learned about managing people and/or managing engineers, whichever direction you want to go? Wow, big question. There are so many different directions we could take that. I'll share a few observations. They don't necessarily all have a particular theme to them. I think as I've been responsible for bigger and bigger teams over time, one of the things that just I repeatedly learn is I personally will not be involved in really any of the decisions that matter and happen. There are thousands of decisions that an organization of any skill is making every single day, every individual engineer or PM is making hundreds of small decisions and some big ones every day that affect the kind of general trajectory. The most important thing is to really focus on hiring the right people, and that means hiring people that you can trust with a tremendous amount of autonomy. If I try to get involved in lots of decisions, everything will grind to a halt. How do you do that? It is important, obviously, to be rigorous. We've described already what our hiring process is. I really lean into getting to know folks in very, very well as we're hiring them. By the way, something I didn't mention earlier that is I think important here is we pay a lot of attention at Stripe during the hiring process to references. This is typically later in the process, but if you put someone through an interview process, you've probably spent what, eight hours total with them? If you talk to people that actually have worked with them before, you're probably benefiting from thousands of hours of direct experience. We take this very seriously, and we try to ask smart questions that will help get real signal out of that. I certainly find when it comes to hiring folks that have then gone on to really make a transformative impact, that references are often the time that you get the best conviction on the hire or not. Hire the right people, and then you have to trust them. Now, trust is interesting. Is actually quite challenging to trust people that you've just hired, right? Well, you've got no stake really on you yet. What I find is you do actually just have to be generous in giving trust and assuming trust by default at the beginning. Then you do need to hold people accountable enough that they are proving that they can handle that trust. Sometimes, that means hiring someone who you think quite plausibly can end up in a very big role into a smaller role to begin with. Other times, you just have the big role that you need to fill, in which case, it's important to be quite conscious about really trusting and delegating to them with a lot of support. I'm always working hard to delegate sometimes a little bit more than I'm comfortable with, because that's the only way to really operate at significant scale. I think something else, and sorry, this is really a smorgasboard is what a lot of differences. Perfect.…

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