Design a new feature in Connect that helps enterprise merchants achieve better outcomes

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Stripe is financial infrastructure for internet businesses; its products include payments, Checkout, Billing, Connect, Radar, Issuing, Terminal, and tax tools.

Stripe Connect powers payment flows for platforms and marketplaces that onboard merchants, route funds, manage payouts, handle compliance, and support growth across geographies. In this interview, you are asked to design a new Connect feature that helps enterprise merchants achieve better business outcomes, such as higher conversion, faster onboarding, fewer payment failures, improved payout reliability, better fraud control, or smoother international expansion.

Focus on the real workflow of an enterprise merchant or platform operator using Connect: integrating payments, monitoring seller or sub-merchant performance, managing risk and compliance, resolving payment issues, and optimizing revenue at scale. These users often have large engineering teams, complex financial operations, multiple regions, high transaction volumes, and strict reliability expectations.

You should clarify which enterprise customer segment and outcome you are targeting, identify the key pain points in their current workflow, and define what the product experience needs to support. The feature should feel credible for Stripe’s ecosystem, including its strengths in developer experience, financial infrastructure, global payments, and operational trust.

The experience should consider:

- The primary user persona, such as a payments product manager, finance operations lead, risk team, developer, or marketplace operator.

- The specific enterprise outcome being improved and how that outcome matters to the business.

- Current workflow friction across onboarding, payment acceptance, routing, reconciliation, fraud, payouts, reporting, or compliance.

- How the feature fits into Connect’s existing platform and developer-facing experience.

- Enterprise constraints, including scale, reliability, auditability, permissions, global regulations, and multi-team workflows.

- How merchants would discover, configure, monitor, and act on the feature.

- What success would look like from both the enterprise customer’s perspective and Stripe’s perspective.

Your goal is to define a clear product opportunity, articulate the user problem, and design a focused Connect feature that improves measurable outcomes for enterprise merchants without overextending into a generic payments dashboard or unrelated financial product.