David Singleton

David Singleton is Chief Technology Officer at Stripe, where he guides engineering and design teams. Has been CTO for 5+ years. Prior to Stripe, was VP of Engineering at Google for 10+ years. Responsible for Stripe’s engineering culture, reliability engineering, developer productivity, and product development processes.

Key ideas

• Co-creation model: build products with a small alpha group of reference users; only release broadly when they are fully satisfied. Identifies adjacent problems users are solving themselves as expansion signals.
• Friction logging: stream-of-consciousness UX quality log from a specific user persona’s perspective; the practice that makes meticulousness real and measurable (10.5% checkout revenue uplift from accumulated small improvements).
• Engineer-cation: 3-4 days of clearing your calendar to join a team, write code, and log internal developer experience friction. Maintains technical context at scale. Recommended for all engineering managers.
• Operating principles as behaviour: Stripe’s principles are distilled from observing the most effective Stripes — not abstract aspirations. Values require practices behind them to become real.
• Reliability and speed simultaneously: design for both rather than trading one for the other. 45-minute code-to-production pipeline at 99.999% uptime.

Appearances

See also

• David Singleton on Stripe
• Reference Customer
• Friction Log
• Brian Chesky on Airbnb and Product