A simple ritual that could change the way your team makes decisions

Coming across a post written by Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, I found myself pausing longer than usual. In the scroll-happy world of tech news and product chatter, it’s rare to see something that feels both incredibly simple and quietly profound.

He shared that at Stripe, every single management meeting begins with a 30-minute conversation with a real customer. This isn’t a monthly showcase or a once-a-quarter deep dive. It happens every time, with around 40 senior leaders from across the company in the room.

No slide decks.

No summaries.

No one reciting research findings on someone else’s behalf.

Just a person. Talking about their experience. Sharing what it’s like to use Stripe in the real world.

Why it matters when a customer is in the room

There’s something different that happens when you hear directly from someone who uses your product. It’s not theoretical. It’s not neatly packaged. It’s honest, messy, surprising, and exactly what most leadership teams need more of.

And the impact isn’t just what you hear. It’s what it aligns. When dozens of decision-makers are listening to the same voice at the same time, a shift happens. Assumptions get challenged. Priorities sharpen. And teams walk out of the room with more clarity than they walked in with.

Suddenly the customer isn’t a persona. Or a chart. Or an anecdote. They’re a real person you’ve heard from, together, and that changes the way conversations unfold for the rest of the meeting. Often, it changes the work that follows.

We see this all the time at Askable

Every week we get a front-row seat to moments where a single customer conversation becomes the reason a team changes direction. Sometimes it saves them from launching something they didn’t realize made no sense. Sometimes it becomes the quote that unlocks a new idea. And every so often, it turns a good feature into a great one by helping teams see it from the outside in.

The energy in those moments is hard to replicate. It’s not the kind of insight you find buried on slide 42 of a presentation. It’s the kind that sticks because you heard it yourself, in someone else’s words. There’s a reason teams move faster when that voice is in the room. It clears the fog.

This is what building with people looks like

When you treat customer input as something that happens early and often, not as an afterthought, the work gets better. You’re not guessing. You’re not debating hypotheticals. You’re not relying on intuition alone.

You’re grounded in real context, and you’re making decisions with the people who will live with the outcomes. That creates momentum. It reduces friction. And it builds a kind of quiet confidence that’s hard to get any other way.

Because instead of spending weeks aligning internally, you’re aligning around something real.

A question worth asking

What would change if your leadership team made space for this kind of interaction?

What if, before your next roadmap decision or strategy session, you heard from one customer? Not a report. Not a summary. Just one voice. One conversation.

At Askable, this is the kind of shift we care about helping teams make. We believe that when real people are closer to the decisions, everything gets clearer. And when that clarity happens across product, design, and research, the whole company starts to move differently.

Better alignment. Better products. Better decisions. All starting with one simple ritual.

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