How would you run the first 90 days after taking over Tax

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.

You have just taken over product ownership for Stripe Tax, with a focus on platform businesses that need to calculate, collect, report, and remit taxes across many merchants, geographies, and transaction types. These customers depend on Stripe for developer-friendly integration, financial accuracy, compliance confidence, and minimal disruption to conversion and merchant growth.

The question asks how you would run your first 90 days: how you would assess the current business and product state, align teams, prioritize work, manage risk, and establish an operating rhythm. The context includes a complex financial infrastructure product where mistakes can create compliance exposure, merchant distrust, support burden, and revenue impact.

Your response should frame the first 90 days as an execution plan rather than a product vision pitch. It should show how you would learn quickly, make decisions under uncertainty, coordinate across product, engineering, design, data, legal, compliance, sales, support, and operations, and define clear checkpoints for progress.

The experience should consider:

- The current state of Stripe Tax for platform businesses, including adoption, activation, accuracy, support pain points, and competitive pressure.

- Key stakeholders and owners across product, engineering, legal, compliance, data, go-to-market, support, and customer success.

- Sequencing across discovery, diagnosis, prioritization, execution, and review within a 30/60/90-day structure.

- Dependencies such as tax rules, jurisdiction coverage, platform APIs, billing flows, reporting systems, merchant onboarding, and internal operational tooling.

- Go/no-go criteria for shipping or expanding capabilities in a financially sensitive product area.

- Risk management, including compliance mistakes, calculation errors, integration regressions, degraded checkout conversion, and customer communications.

- Rollback, escalation, monitoring, and incident response plans for launches or operational changes.

- Communication cadence for executives, cross-functional teams, strategic customers, and frontline teams.

The goal is to describe a credible operating plan for taking over a high-stakes Stripe product, showing how you would create clarity, build trust, reduce execution risk, and move the business forward in the first 90 days without overcommitting before you understand the product, customers, and constraints.