Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)

Jeff Weinstein is a product lead at Stripe, where he helped grow their payment APIs to hundreds of billions in volume and transformed the way founders start companies into a few simple clicks with Atlas. Prior to Stripe, Jeff led several startups and sold companies to Groupon and Box. He’s known for his customer obsession, craft, quality, and building beloved products businesses rely on. In our conversation, we discuss:

• The power of customer obsession and how to operationalize it in the product development process

• How to pick the right metrics and use them to drive impact

• Techniques for getting things done at big companies

• A group practice Jeff started to uplevel product craft, called Study Group

• The story behind Stripe Atlas and its mission to increase entrepreneurship globally

• Lessons from working with the founders of Stripe

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/creating-a-culture-of-excellence

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Where to find Jeff Weinstein:

• X: https://x.com/jeff_weinstein

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffwweinstein/

• Email: [email protected]

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Jeff’s background

(10:16) The “go, go, go ASAP + optimistic, long-term compounding” approach

(15:38) The importance of craft and quality

(24:15) Effective customer communication strategies

(28:57) The importance of speed in customer interactions

(33:19) Narrowing your focus

(36:53) Why you should pay attention only to paying-customer feedback

(40:24) Practicing silence when communicating

(45:33) The role of metrics in product success

(54:08) Empowering teams with a single metric

(58:23) Picking the right metric for your audience

(01:05:10) The importance of metric hygiene

(01:11:33) How Stripe uses “study groups” for product improvement

(01:37:20) Stripe’s Atlas: simplifying company formation

(01:50:38) Automation and operational efficiency

(01:55:13) Diversity and team building

(02:03:09) Building new products within a large company

(02:21:10) Lightning round

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Referenced:

• Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas

• Stripe: https://stripe.com/

• SQL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL

• GitHub: https://github.com/

• Linear: https://linear.app/

• Figma: https://www.figma.com/

• Jeff’s tweet about Stripe’s bug-finder program: https://x.com/jeff_weinstein/status/1777487507934040300

• The “Collison installation”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400504

• How we use friction logs to improve products at Stripe: https://dev.to/stripe/how-we-use-friction-logs-to-improve-products-at-stripe-i6p

• Fidelity: https://www.fidelity.com/

• 83(b) election: https://docs.stripe.com/atlas/83b-election

• Jeff’s tweet about Atlas’s NPS score: