Given the nature of Checkout, we hypothesize that the more distributed the team becomes, the closer we get to the needs and mindsets of more users. One member of the Checkout team launched a local push payment method from Singapore and another shipped address collection from Maryland. One way to more naturally build in local considerations into global products is if they’re built by remote, distributed teams. Whether in Mexico or Malaysia, a company’s checkout experience should feel local and include the payment methods customers are most likely to prefer. We built Checkout to maximize conversion by intelligently prioritizing which payment methods are presented to the customer depending on where they’re located. Commerce is global, but the payment experience is local. However, for many of our global users, credit cards are the alternative still crossing the chasm to mass acceptance. Back in the day, we referred to these internally as “alternative payment methods” because from the perspective of someone living in San Francisco, that is accurate. We’ve made substantial improvements to support non-card payment methods throughout our product suite. This shift has markedly influenced our product development roadmaps. We feel closer to customers because we literally are. Units within the team own one of four coverage areas (each spans approximately six time zones), enabling them to provide more timely, local support to users, as well as run uniform, simultaneous, and regionally resonant customer events around the world. Now, for example, our Developer Support Engineering team is distributed across three continents-and two thirds of the team operate outside of a Stripe office. A year ago, when an overwhelming majority of our engineering staff was located in two cities, it was more difficult to support a global user population with products that felt locally native in supporting commerce. One of our goals in establishing the remote hub was to connect more closely with our customers. Deploying engineers closer to customers has been a boon We’ve seen promising gains in how we communicate, build more resilient and relevant products, and reach and retain talented engineers. We think our experience might be interesting, particularly for businesses that haven’t been fully distributed from the start or are considering flipping the switch to being fully remote, even after the pandemic. It’s now the backbone of a new working model for the whole company. Last year, we set out to rebalance our mix of remote and centralized working by establishing our virtual hub. But as we grew, we developed a heavily office-centric organizational structure. We’ve had remote employees since inception-and formally began hiring remote engineers in 2013. Like many organizations, Stripe has temporarily become fully remote to support our employees and customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also hired more remote employees across all other teams, and tripled the number of remote Stripes across the company. Over the last year, we’ve tripled the number of permanently remote engineers, up to 22% of our engineering population. They now work across every engineering group at Stripe. We set out to hire 100 new remote engineers over the year-and did. Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore.
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