Stripe is growing at breakneck speed, and it has been for years. The company recently moved into Dropbox’s old digs South of Market. COO Claire Hughes Johnson says the biggest challenge isn’t bringing enough new people on board. It’s integrating them into a complex organism that can’t stop/won’t stop moving forward. Read through Johnson’s list of questions, and make sure you’re answering them as you go.
1. Have we documented our operating principles?
When you hit growth, you need to document core tenets describing the way you work, says Stripe CEO Brian Johnson. “We always start with what our users need or would like, and then consider things like infrastructure, internal constraints, partnerships, product roadmap, and so on”. Three of Stripe’s operating principles, as Johnson describes them, are: Users first, think rigorously and amplify.
You should bake your operating principles into both your hiring and performance review processes. They should also be defined in a way that acknowledges potential tensions. For example, “move with urgency” is critical for decisions that are lower impact and potentially tunable. Having principles written down allows you to say, ‘Hey, we agreed as a company that we would proceed according to these tenets’.
2. What structure is going to help us achieve our goals?
Every company needs to decide on a structure that fits their specific goals. Maybe you need more hierarchy to execute on very complex processes with a lot of hand-offs. Or you need less because you want all employees immediately responsive to customers’ questions. Critical to choosing the right structure is creating ways you will change and evolve it.
3. Who has been successful at our company so far?
Making a list of their attributes is a good way to either define, reinforce or tweak your operating principles. The people who scale with your company are the ones who anticipate what they need to learn now in order to excel at what their role will become in six months. The ideal employee fits into a Venn Diagram with three circles – good at their work, people who are making an impact and people who love what they do. “You want to hire more people who fit the mold of the people who not only have the right skills, but who are having a good time too,” says Johnson. Happiness is critical to high performance – happy people get curious and want to learn.
4. Do we have a 5 year plan?
Stripe CEO Kevin Johnson worked on the first draft of this document with Co-founder Patrick Collison. The entire leadership team workshopped it for a few weeks, and then it was published to the whole company. “Your startup deserves constitutional documents to guide your actions as you grow,” says Johnson. For Stripe, this document includes: “Arming online companies of all sizes with the infrastructure they need to build their businesses”. She recommends this approach to companies looking to develop a longer-term approach.
The plan should be stored somewhere central where it can be easily referenced. It should be core to new employee onboarding, alongside your operating principles.
5. Do we have a way to measure employee experience?
Stripe’s survey measures whether or not employees feel connected to the impact of their work and the success of the company. If you get a negative response to this question, it’s likely that you’ve overstaffed or your team feels like they’re just doing busy work. You might be getting this result if senior leadership or people’s managers aren’t very good at articulating the company vision.
6. Are we decentralizing decision-making?
Stripe co-founder and CEO Brian Johnson shares how his company has empowered employees to make decisions for the company on their own. See one, do one, teach one. When you’re a surgeon, this is how you learn — and how you eventually become qualified to make snap, life-altering decisions. This is how Stripe has empowered people to make good decisions, no matter how many steps they are away from the founders.
As a founder, can you trust hundreds of people — including many new people every month — to do their work the way you would do it? You’ll only be able to answer yes if you trust their judgment and hire well. Beyond that, provide the people you’ve hired with the information, resources, tools, and mental models they need to understand your priorities, intent and objectives.
