Their quarterly software engineering magazine (Increment) and publishing imprint (Stripe Press) are impressive on their own. But it’s Stripe’s int

How Stripe Built a Writing Culture

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2024-10-28 20:30:03

Their quarterly software engineering magazine (Increment) and publishing imprint (Stripe Press) are impressive on their own. But it’s Stripe’s internal writing culture that differentiates the company. Whether it’s an email to a colleague or a memo to an entire team, Stripe employees strive to write with excellence.

The result is that Stripe’s internal and external documentation is a central pillar of the company’s reputation and brand.

How did this happen? We sat down with Stripe’s Documentation Manager, Dave Nunez, to learn more about what it takes to build a strong writing culture.

Getting employees to write more frequently shouldn’t be your ultimate goal. Getting them to write more proficiently should be.

“The first emails I saw from our CEO [Patrick Collison] literally had footnotes,” Nunez recalls. “He structured his emails to be like research papers and put the peripheral information at the bottom so as not to detract from the core information.”

Today, footnotes are a common component of internal emails at Stripe. The CEO set the expectation; employees strive to uphold it. But Collison’s approach to writing did more than demonstrate the value of a footnote. It’s understood that at Stripe: