When I was young, I remember my mother telling me I can go play only after I finish my homework. Which was goddam frustrating at the time. But thinking about this, I realise that most of the things I was doing back then were automatically classified into 2 groups:

Now, when I’m all grown up, I think about the things we do online and, ironically, it’s a similar situation. We send emails, buy stuff or book tickets and take these very seriously. But we also have fun wasting time on Instagram or watching videos of a hydraulic press crushing gummy bears on Youtube because… 🤔 Anyway.

Product-market fit is “the only thing that matters” early on in the startup journey, wrote Marc Andreessen in June 2007. Conventionally, product-market fit comes down to early signals that the market has voted your product as the best solution to its problem. In the enterprise, undeniable evidence of product-market fit shows up when an early cohort of evangelical customers are ready to pay more, new prospects are banging down the door to get access, and market demand far exceeds your ability to satisfy it.

It takes three things to build a great product: a vision, a strategy, and a roadmap. We often associate product management with roadmaps, since it’s the tangible piece of the process other teams see. Product managers are also known for articulating the vision for a product as well. But it’s the strategy that connects these two and yet trickier to identify ownership. Does the CEO drive strategy? Does Sales? What does ownership of this decision making look like?

When ownership and process of the strategy is ambiguous, it can make the reasoning behind the roadmap difficult to understand by various organizations in the company. It negatively impacts the organization’s credibility in making decisions. A confusing or inconsistent strategy makes it harder to rally everyone to deliver the very best product experience, which impacts customers.

A great deal of your fulfillment at any company is determined by the extent to which the values of the people and the organization align with your own.
It’s hard to assess culture from the outside and most companies are not good at describing their own nature. (How do fish describe water?) They also have incentives to say things that sound attractive rather than things that are true.
We’ve tried to assemble this guide to Stripe with both challenges in mind. This is our best attempt to share an honest description of our culture today. We hope you find it useful in deciding whether Stripe is the kind of place in which you’d like to spend your time.