Scorecard for Stripe Billing: Merchant Adoption, Revenue Collection and Guardrails

You are a product manager at Stripe working on Billing, the product businesses use to charge their customers on a recurring basis through subscriptions and invoices. Explain how you would measure whether Billing is successful. ```hint Follow a merchant and an invoice Billing serves businesses and the subscribers they charge. Think separately about getting a merchant set up, keeping that merchant, and what happens to each invoice after it is sent. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which merchants matter most here: startups setting up a first subscription plan, or large companies with complex usage-based pricing? - Should success be judged on adoption, ongoing use, Stripe's revenue from Billing, or a balance of these? - Are one-off invoices in scope as well as recurring subscriptions? - Is this an overall health check of Billing, or a plan to measure one launch? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - What Billing does for merchants and their subscribers, turned into the goal that success should reflect. - A clearly defined north-star metric and the metric tree beneath it. - Metrics across the merchant lifecycle: adoption and setup, active use of key features, retention and expansion. - Billing-specific outcomes, such as how much billed money is actually collected and how many failed renewals are recovered, alongside Stripe's revenue from the product. - Guardrails such as billing errors, disputes and subscriber complaints, read by merchant size and pricing model. ### Follow-up Questions - Volume billed through Billing is growing while the number of merchants is flat. What does that tell you, and is it good news? - How would you show that automatic retries of failed payments recover money that would otherwise be lost, rather than money that would have arrived anyway? - A large merchant moves its billing to an in-house system. How would you find out whether a product gap caused it?