Patrick McKenzie: Why is Stripe's Engineering Quality So High?

You need enough chips to play the game — hire a sufficient number of high-caliber talents who care about quality and are smart enough. You must repeatedly emphasize the company's culture of valuing quality, forming formal routines to check large pieces of work and fix what needs fixing.

Tactically, there is a best practice — reduce the difficulty of doing the right thing. The Stripe tech team makes various trade-offs to ensure that any engineer can improve any part of the system. Encourage a sense of ownership.

There are dedicated internal tools to check the level of internationalization, which may seem tedious but is worth the time. It goes back to the company's culture; when an individual contributor says, "I spent some time on i18n last week," they should assume that leadership values this enough to respond, "Of course, you took the time to do this, great job."

"Open a ticket for the relevant team, and someone will handle it" is a good practice, but if you can push this system to resolve tickets faster and better, you can motivate people to open tickets.

The company provides dedicated channels, such as mailing list aliases, to report product quality bugs. There are dedicated teams to triage these tasks or assign them to the appropriate groups for fixing, along with established routines to inform the entire company about the bug fix rate.

Before making significant API changes, both internal and external testing should be conducted. Regularly ask, "Who has a real Stripe account on hand? Can we update to the beta version and try it out?" People need to set aside dedicated time for this and document it thoroughly — imagine having a group of picky customers; while you may not be able to use your product as deeply and broadly as users do, this approach is much better than guessing.

Discovering that "a piece of payment code hasn't been touched in 5 years, and I don't know how it works, and there are no tests" is rare but valuable for the engineering team.

None of the above is high-tech, nor is it a sufficient condition to guarantee quality. Stripe never settles for the current level of quality and does not passively say, "Our standards are high," but rather maintains a proactive approach to continuously improve.