Identifying and engaging Stripe’s most valuable customers.

Project sneak peak

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. 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

Impact

Insights from this project impacted Connect in multiple ways. We created a prioritization framework that considered 1) the level of pain a Connect archetype experienced, 2) the prominence of those archetypes in the Connect Dashboard, and 3) 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 and establish product / feature visions for each roadmap item. We also saw a substantial mindset shift in the Connect team. With deep insights about a variety of users for the first time, the team was able to envision how supporting different types Connect users could create different levels of impact and engagement for Stripe.