Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)

**David Singleton** (0:00)
The way we think about product development at Stripe, it really is to find the correct set of early users to co-create the product with. Maybe the best example of that is Stripe Billing. When we got to starting the Stripe Billing product, we realized that there were a number of our existing users. These were companies like Figma and Slack, who were already using Stripe for payments, but had these subscriptions business models. And we figured that there were going to be many more of these kind of companies into the future.
And we could see that they were really kind of pushing the boundaries of what was possible here. So we decided to co-create the product with them. So we had shared Slack channels. We'd actually show them product on a very regular basis, get their feedback on it. And only when that original kind of alpha group was super, super happy with the product, did we then think it might be ready to go to a broader audience. So that is just how we build product at Stripe. And that means that every engineer building product at Stripe really has many of the kind of attributes and will exercise many of the attributes that you'll often find in PMs in other companies.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:04)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is David Singleton. David is Chief Technology Officer at Stripe, where he's responsible for guiding its engineering and design teams, a role he's had for over five years. Prior to Stripe, David was VP of Engineering at Google, where he spent over a decade. And in hearing from David, you'll quickly be able to tell how passionate he is about the craft of building great products and building great teams. We dig into Stripe's unique approach to hiring, how they built a very product-oriented engineering team, which allowed them to hold off on hiring their first product manager for many, many years, how they operationalize their operating principle of be meticulous in your craft, including a number of fascinating internal processes like engineer occasions, walking the store and something called friction logging. David also shares what it takes to run an engineering culture with the uptime and scale requirements of a Stripe, plus how AI is already impacting how they work and lessons around leadership, management and planning. I am so thankful David carved out time to come on the podcast and I know that you'll learn something valuable from it. With that, I bring you David Singleton. After a short word from our sponsors.
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