Building a GREAT product: Valerie (Stripe, GoPay, Twitter)
Head of Product (APAC) @ Stripe, ex-Chief Growth Officer @ GoPay, ex-Snr. Director (Product) @ Twitter
Valerie has spent her career at the forefront of product and growth, helping scale some of the world’s most iconic tech platforms.
She founded a startup that got acquired by Twitter (now X), served as Chief Growth Officer at GoPay (fintech arm of GoTo, Indonesia’s largest tech company), and most recently as Head of Product (APAC) at Stripe (~US$100B valuation).
In this conversation, Valerie shares what separates great product teams from good ones, how to build strong customer feedback loops, and why "product-market fit" is not just about the product.
Q: What separates the best product teams you’ve seen from the rest?
Valerie: The best product teams are relentlessly customer-obsessed - but that mindset has to come from the very top, the CEO.
At Stripe, for example, the weekly C-suite executive staff meeting includes a real customer, as does the weekly company all-hands. That direct connection shapes everything. At Twitter, despite the entire company using the platform constantly, we got too far removed from truly understanding users, and the work I did leading Growth Product reestablished our more nuanced understanding of users through qualitative research, data science, and relentlessly communicating insights out across the company.
The other trait is high accountability with clear expectations. Teams thrive when they understand the exact vision, the bar for product quality, and the principles guiding their decisions. Leaders need to operate at both 30,000 feet to communicate a clear strategy and 3 feet to give feedback to keep product quality excellent. Then let teams run and hold them accountable for results.
Q: How do you structure product teams for speed and clarity?
Valerie: Keep them small. Especially now with AI, you can do more with less - teams are managing bots as much as people.
It’s also critical to design teams with complementary skill sets and temperaments. You want that yin-yang balance with high trust and willingness to debate - this dynamic has existed within all of my favorite leadership teams I’ve worked with, especially with my cofounder at ZipDial. Then ultimately you need clarity on who owns decisions. Whether you call it a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) or a single-threaded owner, make decision rights explicit. It’s the fastest way to maintain quality while moving quickly.
Q: You've worked across both B2B and B2C. Do you see fundamental differences in product strategy?
Valerie: I don’t start with “Is this B2B or B2C?” I start with: What’s your customer segment?
Everything follows from that: growth model, GTM, regulation, partnerships. Whether you're hyperlocal or global, regulated or not - those factors shape your product and business strategy more than just being B2B or B2C.
That said, B2C teams often benefit from faster feedback loops with more data that allows for more rapid, statistically significant experiment results. In B2B, where customer cycles are slower and volumes smaller, you need to think differently about how to measure success and adjust course.
Q: Everyone talks about product-market fit. How do you know when you’ve found it?
Valerie: It’s not just product-market fit. It’s product, market, channel, and pricing fit. You need to pressure-test all four. Is this the right product for the right segment, at the right price, through the right distribution? Only then does it work.
And you know it’s working when your metrics compound. More users today than yesterday. More revenue today than yesterday.
Retention is the crucial metric that powers any product’s growth - regardless of B2B or B2C. Really focusing on user retention, understanding the why behind the metrics, and deploying strategies to better retain users was at the heart of how my teams at both Twitter and GoPay helped turn around sustainable user growth.
Q: What does a strong product feedback loop look like?
Valerie: You start with a hypothesis on the customer value proposition: “I believe xyz target customers have this pain point.” That can be based on your experience, small surveys, even click-throughs on landing pages. Then you validate it - both qualitatively and quantitatively. Build, test, refine.
Then develop your go-to-market hypothesis for your growth model and test that. What channels do you believe will work? What’s the expected performance? You need a clear, falsifiable hypothesis - informed by benchmarks - otherwise, you can’t tell if you’re over- or under-performing.
Once go-to-market is validated, then do the same hypothesis validation for your business model, pricing and profit formula.