An interview with Claire Highes Johnson
High Growth Handbook: https://growth.eladgil.com/book/introduction/elad-gil/
Urs Holzle, who was an early SVP at Google, literally wrote, “A Guide To Urs” about the interaction approaches that work best for him. So if you needed to interact with him or you wanted things from him, you knew what to do. And apparently that really helped streamline how people worked with him.
I wrote a document back when I was at Google called, “Working with Claire.” And when I first got to Stripe, I adapted it slightly, but it was pretty relevant. I shared it with everyone who was working with me closely, but I made it an open document. It spread quite quickly through the organization. It made sense, because I was new, I was in a leadership role, people wanted to understand me. And then people started asking, “Well, why don’t we have more of these?”
It’s been a little bit of a viral, organic adoption, and now a lot of people at Stripe have written their own guides to themselves. I’ve even had folks who are not managers but are on my team write me these guides to them. And it’s been super insightful. So I’m a huge fan.
https://growth.eladgil.com/book/the-role-of-the-ceo/insights-working-with-claire/
I think that founders should write a guide to working with them. It would be one of the pieces I’m describing, to clarify the founder’s role: “What do I want to be involved in? When do I want to hear from you? What are my preferred communication modes? What makes me impatient? Don’t surprise me with X.” That’s super powerful. Because the problem is, people learn it in the moment, and by then it’s too late.
What decisions do you think should not be made by a group? There are a variety of different models; some orgs are very consensus driven, and some are almost dictatorial depending on who’s in charge. Are there specific things that you think should always just be owned by an individual? Or do you think it really depends on the context? What should the CEO not delegate, in other words?
I would say that there’s a difference between a CEO or founder facilitating a group discussion to get opinions from people and making a group decision. And they might need to say, “Okay, ultimately, I’m the one who’s going to make this decision.”
Sometimes that gets confused, though, because the group thinks they’re the decision-maker and that the goal is consensus. When really the goal is, “Let’s hash it out together. We may not all agree. One person will be the decision- maker, and then we will all commit to it.” If you don’t clarify what kind of decision this is, then groups really struggle because their expectations are not set correctly.
When I’m leading through a tough decision, I try to say, at the outset, “I want all of your opinions, but I’m going to be the one who ultimately makes the decision.” Or in some cases, I will say, “I don’t know if I’m the right decision- maker. I need help exploring what the decision vectors are, and I need all of your help. And then I will let you know how we’re going to make the decision once we’ve talked about it.” If you don’t give people that guidance, which is I think a common mistake, you’re likely to run into trouble.
One thing I’ve been talking a lot about with our engineering team is that usually your company’s plans and incentives and metrics structures aren’t built to stop things, or to stop and redo things. So if there is a need to pay down some technical debt or make a really hard call on stopping a project, you need a leadership voice, or even a CEO, to say, “Hey, we’re just not doing this anymore.” Because the org is always oriented toward making it work. I think decisions to stop or to retrench or to rebuild usually have to come from a leader if not a leadership team.
What are the different levels at which companies should be planning? How do these different levels come together, and how frequently should a company do them?
At every stage, though, you want to find a balance between that longterm charter (“Why do we exist?”) and the short-term plan (“What are we going to do?”).
There is a balance between focusing too much on either the short term or the long term. The key to me is having two documents. The first—at Stripe, we’re calling them charters—articulates the long-term view of why this team or this product or this company exists, what its overarching strategy is, and what success would look like over even a three-to-five year period. And then the second is a shorter-term plan: “Okay, in the near term, then, what are we trying to get done?” That can look like a results- based management model or an OKR—objectives and key results— model. But it’s some way that a team can say, “This is where we’re going long term. And on a quarterly basis, this is where we’re focusing. We’re hoping to move X and Y metrics.”
I think a charter needs a re-look roughly annually. And the goal-setting and OKRs is probably more like quarterly or bi-annually, depending on what kind of product you have. One thing that we do annually now—in addition to the charters—is set company metric targets for the coming year. We’re adjusting the plans against those targets every quarter too.
How far ahead do you think your charter or strategic plan should go?
One thing that I have really thought about is the set of what I’m going to call “founding documents” that are really important for any company to have, especially as you get beyond, say, 50 or 100 people. That includes your mission statement and your vision, but also your overarching longterm goals. When we wrote that document for Stripe, I thought of as it the three-to-five-year plan. But we just called it long-term goals publicly in the company. And if you read those goals again today—and I worked on them, the leadership team worked on them, three years ago—they’re still the same. And I don’t think they’re actually going to change even in three to five years. They’re our long-term goals.
You need to codify a set of principles and behaviors and then cohere to them, culturally. And those founding documents shouldn’t change very often. We refresh those operating principles every year, but they don’t change that meaningfully. I don’t think founding documents should change frequently.
When it comes to a given product or area of the business, then the longest you’re probably going to project out is three years. Because things are changing so rapidly when you’re at a growth stage that you can’t really go much past that.