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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
Watching you operate on Twitter, you're just breaking this wall between the PM and the customer.

**Jeff Weinstein** (0:04)
The moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem, that's a unbelievable gift. I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them. If you're text message friendly with five or 10 of those, you are going to have so much direct signal that is infectious.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
Many people told me I need to ask you about picking metrics.

**Jeff Weinstein** (0:24)
Well, what was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer, and can we measure it from their perspective?
Okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Charts that showcase things are going up and to the right on one hand, and then tweets on the other.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:36)
You started at Stripe, something called Study Groups.

**Jeff Weinstein** (0:38)
We show up four to eight people total, pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Rule one is you do not work at Stripe, and rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:56)
Today, my guest is Jeff Weinstein. Over the course of his six plus years at Stripe, Jeff was the product lead for Stripe's payment infrastructure teams. We helped scale Stripe payments to hundreds of billions of dollars in volume a year. He also led PMs and teams on a number of zero to one bets at Stripe, and most recently took on the scaling of Stripe Atlas, which as of the day this podcast launches, allows you to incorporate a new company in a single day, including handling 83B elections, incorporation documents, getting your EIN, share purchases and all the things that used to take weeks or months before a company could begin operating. At this point, one in six new Delaware corporations are started on Stripe Atlas, which blows my mind. This episode ended up being the longest in my podcast history because I wanted to basically do an archaeology of an incredibly effective and admired product leader.
We spent the entire conversation digging deep into the many skills that Jeff has built that enable him to consistently build successful and beloved products. We get into his go-go-go plus optimism, long-term compounding philosophy of building products, how to think about and operationalize product craft and quality. He shares a popular program that he started at Stripe called Stripe Study Groups that I think you should steal. We also talk about how to effectively talk to customers, how to know if you have product market fit for your new product, how to pick great metrics for your team, what he's learned about getting shit done at a big company, also advice that he's gotten from the founders of Stripe, and so much more. This episode is for anyone who's looking to level up their product building chops in every way.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Jeff Weinstein.
Jeff, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Jeff Weinstein** (2:50)
Thank you, Lenny, of Lenny's Podcast. I was, I wasn't, I knew what to expect, but it is fun to see the first name and the podcast all line up. I really appreciate you asking.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:59)
So I wanted to start with a quote that I found from you that I think gives a little perspective into how you think and how you approach the world. So here's the quote. Very frequently, I would do poorly on test in school and then the professor would say very reasonably, Hey, I think you should bump down a level to the previous semester's pace.
And you said, I actually know that that's why I'm in this class. I want to be in the class that I'm potentially the worst at.
This isn't how most people think. This is how most people operate. Usually people want to get good grades. They want to be at the top of their class. Clearly you have a different approach and a different mindset.
Where did this come from for you? And how did this shape the way you think about product and the work that you do?

**Jeff Weinstein** (3:37)
Well, some of it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to rationalize it for myself in some form. So in retrospect, that sounds kind of highfalutin. But at the time, I just wasn't particularly good at the classes I was in. But I think it comes from growing up, I went to a pretty hippie dippy K through 12 school in Baltimore, Maryland, where we were really asked to think about why we were in school and to pick any of the courses that were of interest to us outside of AP programs or grades or any particular requirements. You really got to choose your own path. And I recall one particular class in high school, which was somewhat a science class, but it was called the History of Science.