
Kevin Yien
@kevinyien
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product @stripe • thinking out loud • made of 🍦 • random ideas (#sparkfile)
Austin, TX
Joined February 2012
Your career is not a ladder, it's a game. Those who treat it like ladder will make linear progress at best and let their fear hold them back. Those who treat it like a game will collect the resources, find the people, and build the skills that compound — and have fun doing it!
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We’ve been shipping a lot to help developers build new AI products and make money doing it. Here’s a recap of what @stripe launched last week: A new API to track model pricing changes and protect your margins:
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URLs are part of the product experience
LOVE that @stripe finally added account IDs (acct_xxx) to the URL 👏 Makes it so much easier to create permalinks to the correct Stripe account. Moral of the story: URLs are underrated – you should always try to persist state in the URL if you can.
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there isn’t really a point to this i’m just quite optimistic about how much better the things we build and consume will get
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$arbe sold most of the position with plenty of time , going to let these eat.
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that’s super fluffy so here’s a tangible example for a designer the best i know are not only using AI dev tools (eg cursor, v0) but do more with actual code, but also using existing tools to enhance their core (eg new motion plugins for figma, agents to perform audits)
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the best in any field are *compelled* to learn new things, try new methods, blur the lines of trade — all while honing the core set everyone else relies on
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the meme version of this is “you won’t be replaced by AI, you’ll be replaced by the version of you who uses AI” there is some truth in that but it’s not the point i’m making it’s not about tool adoption, it’s about mindset and application
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i find many people underestimate the variance of skill within a discipline whenever i hear “x function is going to be replaced by AI”, i think they’ve never worked with someone great in that discipline
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shoutout to @Daniel_E_Wood and team for building a great experience that has saved stripe users countless hours
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this is one of those things that is: - very hard to build - very hard to get right - very hard to communicate "organizations" was meant for larger users yet we've seen *massive* adoption from startups, solopreneurs, and SMBs bc of its value and ease
I don't know who is the product manager at @stripe that was in charge of making the Organization system, but they cooked!! You can create an account and copy all the settings of a previous account in 2 clicks instead of manually adding everything, so good!
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wild that to this day you can't create a new channel in slack by starting a new message
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proto rig the future of bitcoin mining hardware × software × operations built with 🧡 by a stellar team proud to play a small part in it
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this section on the posthog homepage has to be one of the clearest / boldest / best ways of showing your product suite succinctly (now and future) — love it
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the crossover i didn’t know i needed @danshipper x @lennysan two of my favorite writers / thinkers jamming on ai — what more do you want?
ive been lucky enough to do a lot of cool stuff recently but this one is pretty surreal thanks for having me on @lennysan 🫶
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the recommended action may still be the same (“write this doc, then work with them on a plan”) but the mentality will be totally different.
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now every interaction with that team (and often others) is viewed as “us vs them” and they clearly never get it. this is obviously bad. instead, it’s the manager’s responsibility to frame why the other team might feel / act that way.
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leadership anti-pattern: tribalism veiled as camaraderie it’s common to complain about another team (“they don’t get it”). it’s tempting as a (new) manager to empathize and agree (“yeah i hear you”). but this taints that person’s perspective (and lasts longer than you think).
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++ to this once upon a time agency background was viewed as red flag because they “never saw the work through” but i almost always look for it for these exact reasons (fast, creative, versatile, gritty — can’t be phased)
some of the most versatile designers I've worked with come from digital agencies, not big tech. they're hungrier, scrappier and less expensive. they can jump between product design, branding, motion and illustration. big tech usually boxes you into one specialty. there's
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