Identifying and engaging Stripe’s most valuable customers.
Project context
Background
Stripe gained mainstream success as an infrastructure tool, but wanted to engage customers in daily work. While most Stripe customers were happy to “set and forget” Stripe, those who used Stripe Connect (a tool for platforms and marketplaces) tended to have a higher volume of active users in Stripe’s Dashboard and had Stripe’s biggest financial footprint of customers. If we could identify which types of users were in the Dashboard, and how to create value for them, we might be able to move Stripe perceptions beyond being an infrastructure tool.
Most Stripe Connect customers are enterprises, like Shopify and Squarespace. They use Stripe to facilitate payments between their customers and their customers’ customers.
Research questions
How do Connect businesses manage their financial and customer data?
Which types of roles within the company handle what types of data? How do their needs differ?
Which related tasks are done within Stripe’s Dashboard today? Which happen outside of Stripe’s Dashboard? For those that happen outside of Stripe’s Dashboard, which are well supported, and which aren’t?
Project team
My role: Lead user researcher
Immediate team: PM, EM, lead designer, and DS for Core Connect products
Key stakeholders: Head of Connect Product, Head of Connect Engineering, Lead PM and Lead DS for Core Connect
Approach
Method
Repurposing of generalized Stripe customer survey: Re-analyzed a pre-existing survey focused on how different types of customers use Stripe’s Dashboard. This analysis looked only at users that came from a Connect business.
Loosely structured interviews: Based on survey analysis, I created 4 broad groups of users to interview, and a loosely structured interview guide to allow participants to teach us things we didn’t yet know.
Method spotlight: To help us understand who to interview, and what topics they could educate us about, we needed survey data to learn more broadly about the user base. This helped us develop a reliable sample for interviews, and generate topics to interview participants about.
Sample
Survey: 190 responses from Connect users active in Stripe’s Dashboard (90% confidence in insights, with 5% confidence intervals).
Interviews: 22 interviews across four broad groups of users; 1) support and fraud operations, 2) financial and customer reporters, 3) accountants, 4) founders or execs.
Key challenges and solutions
Little understanding of Connect users
Challenge: Connect had gained traction for solving infrastructure problems for 1-2 angry platforms. “Insights” generated to-date were generated based on anecdotes and centered only around the “Ops” specialist, a role we knew had little influence within platform businesses. This user was often thought of as “the” Connect user because of their prominence in the Dashboard. As a result, we had little idea of which types of users we needed to interview.
Solution: Collaborated with data science to better understand the number and variety of roles within Connect businesses. Re-analyzed survey data looking only at Connect users to understand typical roles and tasks done in Stripe Dash.
Tight timelines to impact
Challenge: In order to impact Core Connect’s 2022 product roadmap, we needed to have the (large) project done in four weeks. I had just transitioned to working with the Connect org, and had few working relationships to help me influence.
Solution: In my research brief, I laid out two different approaches (a four versus six week approach), and what we would be sacrificing as a result (confidence in roles researched, quantification of insights making prioritization more difficult. As a result, I was able to negotiate an extra two weeks for the project.
Key insights
#1: Within Connect businesses, six types of users complete tasks that help the businesses reach their financial goal and support their customers.
#2: These users completed a mix of proactive and reactive tasks both in and outside of Stripes’ Dashboard.
#3: Only Connect users focused on proactive tasks stand to gain substantial value from Stripe, but highly active Connect users, focused on reactive tasks, experienced significant pain daily.
Strategists and overseers stood to gain the most value from Stripe and had little support from existing tools. Often work they completed related to Stripe data was done in bespoke tools. However, building to engage these users would require building net-new features and products.
Remediators and investigators were in Stripe’s Dashboard nearly everyday. While their tasks were low-value and they had little influence over businesses decisions, their roles relied on Stripe and they experienced significant pain and toil daily.
Key challenges and solutions
Shift in team beliefs
Deeper insight into the breadth of Connects’ user base illustrated how supporting different types Connect users could create different levels of impact and engagement for Stripe. This ultimately led to a shift in Connects’ beliefs about their user base and how they should invest in it.
2022 roadmap definition
Based on insights, we created a prioritization framework that considered:
The level of pain a Connect archetype experienced
The prominence of those archetypes in the Connect Dashboard
The effort it would take to solve each archetypes pain points or unmet needs.
This allowed us to build a short and long term product roadmap.
Established product definition(s)
Detailed insights around each archetypes pain points or unmet needs enabled Core Connect to create detailed product briefs, with a solid understanding of what problem the team needed to solve, for who. This enabled us to jump start development.
Example product impact
As an example of product impact this research had, the Core Connect team designed and implemented a compliance center aimed at solving the pain and toil Remediators experienced daily.
