Lenny’s Podcast with David Singleton (Former Stripe CTO)

I listened to this podcast basically twice. about half way the first time I had the idea I wanted to send this to the Vula team (as we often send interesting things) and then I thought I would want to be able to refer back to this so hence am adding it here!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PF15RLvqlkX9QmpkKu1FC

Friction Logging (like our Snag-lists)

• Start by deeply understanding the user you are emulating and review your product
• Monthly PMs do this exercise
• Often they conduct friction logs as a team, with other teams like support etc
• Prioritize fixing them before moving to the next project

Quote: “It is like being a chef tasting the soup”

Engineer-cation

• 4 continuous days a year, join a new team, get a ticket and run it
• It will show you the processes, docs and architecture in a new light
• Make sure to make your own friction logs when doing this to help reflect and learn

Stripe’s Approach to Reliability & Deployments

• 16.4 deploys per day, every day and yet 99.999% uptime
• No manual testers — all were automated tests
• Slowly traffic is raised as to test load
• Reliability features took priority over new features
• On PRs, engineers could auto-merge their own code if approved (high trust, automated deployment) by clicking a checkbox — meaning they don’t need to remember to go back to it

Sunday Evening Reflection Habit

Every Sunday evening,David notes down what a good week will look like.

Hiring at Stripe

• Focused on product-minded builders (not devs)
• “We are building economic structure for the web and more”
• Guided by users
• want to collaborate and work with the everyone else on the team
• patient when hiring — waiting for people until they can join Stripe
• there is a recruiting team but they never are hiring on their own
• align on mission and fulfilment with the hire
• align on the opportunity maximisation of this role (would they be the best person, is stripe the best place for them)
• do pair programming in the interview
• everyone must be autonomous and able to trust with giving autonomy
• peoples references are worth chasing and spending time — they have a better signal because they have better hours
• “What leader have you worked with that you really looked up to?” “You are now their manager, how can they improve?”

Product Managers (PMs) at Stripe

• No PMs until 200 employees as all early employees were product-minded engineers, and the first users were developers
• Built products through co-creation with customers: (Regular sharing and feedback, engineers needed to know customers, only releasing once they were sure of love of the product)
• PMs now are the professors of their areas and take that knowledge around the rest of Stripe (are interfaces)

Core Principles

Defined after reflecting on why they thought Stripe was successful

1. Users first
2. Urgency and focus
3. Meticulous