Inside PM at Stripe: What Comes After "Become a Builder"?

Kevin Yien is the Head of Product for Merchant Experiences at Stripe. Before that he led Product at Mutiny and Square. In this episode, Kevin and I discuss how to keep AI from becoming theater, why a PM shipping to production can be a red flag, and why AI is pulling product management back to its fundamentals of strategy, opinion, and judgment.

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Key topics:

• Why "PM is dead" is the wrong frame, and every function is "shifting left"

• The three PM archetypes, and how zero-to-one changed most

"Killing your darlings" and keeping the blast radius small

• From a personal knowledge corpus to a shared "team brain"

• The "floors and ceilings" of a shared knowledge base

• Why building 10 prototypes no one sees is just theater

• Writing as "clarity at scale," and why LLMs still can't do it

• Why vibe coding is a wasted learning opportunity unless you interrogate it

• The "eight and 80 test" for joy, pace, and hard family seasons