A very interesting article. I think that any writer on Substack knows how important writing is to articulate thinking, and your article shows how this can become a 360 practice for a whole team & business. My immediate thought was how they prevented this becoming overwhelming in application, especially in a fast moving tech company. Definitely, great food for thought.
"No brainstorming before writing. Stripe discouraged real-time ideation in meetings. Instead, everyone wrote down their thoughts independently first to ensure deeper insights." -- I'm really glad to see this concept coming forward inside companies. The "Working together, individually" is also a principle that's part of workshops like Design Sprints (which help teams come up with prototypes and testing in only a few days), since brainstorming is highly ineffective, despite having become such a pervasive buzzword 😄
People have lost a bit the ability to work asynchronously, and it has affected the speed at which companies can take decisions, because everyone must be in the same room at the same time.
I hadn't heard about the culture of writing at Stripe. It's really cool. It's kind of creating your own knowledge bank at work, and possibly now using that with AI to do some pattern recognition on what you tend to like/dislike. Agree with the benefits that writing can bring, and how it can unlock a new layer of clarity in the work you do every day! Thanks for putting this together, Giacomo.
Oh basically chatgpt/claude text to speech. Kinda vibe writing. You can prompt it to ask you a set of questions that directs your thinking too! Found it especially useful when i feel lazy to write etc!
A very interesting article. I think that any writer on Substack knows how important writing is to articulate thinking, and your article shows how this can become a 360 practice for a whole team & business. My immediate thought was how they prevented this becoming overwhelming in application, especially in a fast moving tech company. Definitely, great food for thought.
I had the same thought.
I assume it takes a lot of effort to instill such culture - but if it comes from the founders it must be easier.
"No brainstorming before writing. Stripe discouraged real-time ideation in meetings. Instead, everyone wrote down their thoughts independently first to ensure deeper insights." -- I'm really glad to see this concept coming forward inside companies. The "Working together, individually" is also a principle that's part of workshops like Design Sprints (which help teams come up with prototypes and testing in only a few days), since brainstorming is highly ineffective, despite having become such a pervasive buzzword 😄
People have lost a bit the ability to work asynchronously, and it has affected the speed at which companies can take decisions, because everyone must be in the same room at the same time.
Absolutely! I think would be great to swap recurring meetings out with rarer, but more strategic/effective one
I hadn't heard about the culture of writing at Stripe. It's really cool. It's kind of creating your own knowledge bank at work, and possibly now using that with AI to do some pattern recognition on what you tend to like/dislike. Agree with the benefits that writing can bring, and how it can unlock a new layer of clarity in the work you do every day! Thanks for putting this together, Giacomo.
Thank you for the kind words.
Glad it helped!
Writing is really a superpower, and it surely helps reasoning and therefore decision-making.
100% Giacomo! Even vocal journaling with AI tools has lately been helpful for me personally.
How does vocal journaling work?
Oh basically chatgpt/claude text to speech. Kinda vibe writing. You can prompt it to ask you a set of questions that directs your thinking too! Found it especially useful when i feel lazy to write etc!
I agree on the writing suggestion, and, sorry, I couldn't hold myself from posting this 😬
https://newsletter.consultingintel.com/p/beyond-slides-pre-order
Well done!
Congrats 🙂
I’ll definitely have a look/read!