Product management is simple: Insights from Stripe's Jeff Weinstein
Jeff Weinstein, product lead at Stripe, was recently interviewed on the Lenny podcast.
As an avid Lenny (and Stripe) fan, I dove into the interview... and about 15 minutes in I had to pause it.
Where's my notepad?
Gotta write some of this wisdom down.
Here are my notes from Jeff's interview and his no-BS reminders of what product management should really be about.
Captain Obvious
Product management is simple.
It's not easy. But it's simple.
Throughout the 2-hour interview, Jeff reminds us of the basics:
Be customer-obsessed
Focus on solving a real pain
Welcome feedback (it's a blessing)
Track the right metrics
Work fast (with long-term in mind)
Do it all in an economically viable way
It's not rocket science. It's not 'frameworks' and fancy acronyms. It's not 'models'.
It's simpler than that.
Listen to your customers. Solve their biggest pain. Track their success. Act now.
Simple. I love it.
Solve a real problem
Jeff shares a great story from his first startup.
His app, one day, decided to crash. His team rushed to get it back up and running, managing to do so in about 20 minutes. Success!
Or is it?
He later realised he had missed something crucial: no customer complained. The product was inaccessible for 20 minutes and no one got angry.
And so it dawned on him: his product wasn't solving a real pain.
I didn't realise that's the signal we didn't have PMF.
Focussing on solving a real problem is the ultimate unlock for product. Customers will line up to pay you to solve a real problem. And not all problems are created equal.
People don't get out of bed for their second problem.
How do you find a 'first' problem? By listening to your customers 👇.
Customer obsession
Jeff is customer-obsessed.
If someone has a strategy for making revenue that isn't getting it from customers, I want to know about it.
First, he reminds us: it's all about the customer. Not about you. Not about your product. Not about your pitch. It's about them and their problem.
Then, he tells us to listen carefully.
You have to carefully listen and not pitch your prospects.
I'm sometimes on calls with a very well-meaning person, a founder presenting a new product, and the first thing they do is say 'Hi I'm the CEO and we do 1, 2, 3 and I want to show you a demo'.
You've just wasted an opportunity. I have so many problems. You're guessing ahead of time. Now you've anchored yourself to the pitch and you'll miss the burning problem I have.
To make sure he doesn't miss out on key problems, Jeff practices silence. He hops on calls, asks questions, and then listens.
It's a little awkward. You sit in silence.
But soon it pays off.
If you have amazing, smart, ambitious customers they'll want to offload their things to someone. From silence, you can create a roadmap really quickly.
Finally, be as accessible and curious as possible.
Jeff isn't afraid to engage on X and share his work email publicly. He sees feedback as a blessing, going out of his way to chase it and obsess over the customer.
The customer is where the business comes from. It's not a long-shot idea. It's customers. The fact that people wouldn't be jumping through the computer to listen to them surprises me.
Do they have a different strategy?
Of course, Stripe have an advantage there: millions of customers, a worldwide brand, and billions of transactions.
But this even applies to startups. Go where the customer is. Engage. Listen. Learn.
Speed
Jeff credits speed for a lot of his success.
I will leave a meeting. I'll change what I'm doing to get one message back [to a customer]. Even if it's just to say 'I'm about to get dinner, I'll hit you back tomorrow'.
And it's not just about speed around actioning customer feedback.
Jeff shares a story from Stripe Atlas.
Atlas' goal was to enable a Stripe customer to incorporate a startup in Delaware in a few clicks. One of the core parts of this process is submitting physical paperwork via the mail.
Before embarking on months of product development, this became their first milestone. Could they programme something that would get a blank piece of paper delivered to the Stripe office the next day? Simple enough.
Sure enough, they could. And thus milestone one of this huge project was achieved.
This is an excellent example of operating with a bias for action.
Product management is not rocket science
This could have been the title of the episode.
It's fascinating how simple product management is, once boiled down to its essentials.
I needed this episode. I needed this straight talk. I needed this reminder.
You probably do, too.
There are plenty more excellent takeaways from this episode. Spend the ~2 hours listening to it; trust me.
Listened to that episode last week and I loved. Hell it made me consider getting into product management 😂
I like the part where he said he doesn't follow any fancy frameworks or anything. Just be obsessed with the customer's problem
Love this!