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

The way we think about product development at Stripe, it, it really is to find the correct set of early users to kind of co-create the product with. Maybe, uh, 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, um, who were already using Stripe for payments, but had these subscriptions business models. And we figured that there were gonna be many more of these kind of companies into the future and we, we could see that they, 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, 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, in PMs in, in other companies.

(instrumental music) 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. This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel, offering powerful self-serve product analytics. If you listen to this podcast, you know that it's really hard to build great product without making compromises. And when it comes to using data, a lot of teams think that they only have two choices: make quick decisions based on gut feelings or make data-driven decisions at a snail's pace. But that's a false choice. You shouldn't have to compromise on speed to get product answers that you can trust. With Mixpanel, there are no trade-offs. Get deep insights at the speed of thought at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel builds powerful and intuitive product analytics that everyone can trust, use, and afford. Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com. And while you're at it, they're hiring. Check out mixpanel.com to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscription, and payments. Eppo supports tests on the front end, on the back end, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Eppo at GetEppo.com. That's GetEppo.com and 10X your experiment velocity. David, welcome to the podcast.