We want Stripes to support the decisions they make with numbers and narrative. Give me an example of a time you did that.

Why the Interviewer Asks This Question
How to Answer
1st Answer Example
2nd Answer Example
Community Answers

Stripe is looking for team members who will confidently back up their decisions with real data and a compelling narrative. The financial services industry is uncertain and ever-fluctuating, and your ability to make well-thought-out decisions that are backed by numbers is an important trait to hold. Your interviewer wants to hear the experience you have doing just that.

Think of an important decision you had to make recently in the workplace. Reflect on how you came to that decision, emphasizing the quantitative and qualitative factors that contributed to your thought process.

"My current company has been expanding, and I recently had to make a few important hiring decisions on our team. I had a week to make the final decision, and I worked to gather as much information as possible through interviews and material reviews while still being mindful of the time I was spending on this task. I then weighed potential hiring outcomes by thinking about each candidate's pros and cons, and I ultimately came to a decision to bring on three new team members through a mix of comparing the applicants' sales numbers and ranking the importance of various qualitative traits they held."

"On a client call a few weeks ago, the client shared new information with us that would have a major impact on our profit margins with them. Quickly reviewing the numbers they shared with me, I made the decision to share two potential steps forward with this client. Either we would have to raise their monthly retainer by 10% or we would need to cut off business going forward, as they had been consistently unprofitable for us given the height of their demands. This ultimatum led to the client agreeing to the higher but necessary retainer, and we've been successfully doing business since."

Anonymous Answer

"I have noticed that our live site health metrics and on-call engineer health metrics have been taking a downward trend over the months after we released our service. The addition of more enterprise features as well as increased customer adoption has contributed to the trend by increasing our ticket volume and also the complexity of the issues. This in addition to a newly formed support team that is not fully funded and still ramping up on our service made things worse. Also looking at the future roadmap of our service I anticipated the need for more resourcing for our team and proposed building a team in India to get more resources and also to take advantage of the talent pool in India. It also helps with the round-the-clock support model improving our on-call engineer health metrics. Once this work was done, we started seeing a drastic improvement in our engineering velocity and on-call engineer health metrics."

Amanda's Feedback

Well done! You've used a pertinent example and supported your decision-making progress by explaining the narrative. However, you can strengthen this answer by proving approximate percentages or KPI numbers regarding the downward trend you were seeing, how much your ticket volume increased, and how adding the team in India improved your on-call engineer health metrics. Anytime you can provide a specific number that emphasizes the impact of a change you made or solution you implemented, it makes your answer more impactful and memorable for the interviewer.