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

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 Stripe Terminal, the product that helps platforms and businesses accept in-person payments through Stripe’s hardware, SDKs, APIs, and payment infrastructure. The question asks how you would run your first 90 days as the product leader responsible for execution, alignment, and momentum.

Your response should focus on how you would quickly understand the business, customers, product surface area, operational constraints, and team priorities before making or changing commitments. Terminal sits at the intersection of software, hardware, payments reliability, compliance, fraud, developer experience, and merchant growth, so execution needs to account for both product velocity and operational dependability.

Frame the problem as a 90-day operating plan: how you would learn, prioritize, align stakeholders, make decisions, manage dependencies, and communicate progress. You are not expected to redesign Terminal; you are expected to show how you would take ownership of an existing product area and drive disciplined execution.

The experience should consider:

- Key users and stakeholders, including platform businesses, their merchants, developers, support teams, sales, risk, compliance, hardware operations, and engineering.

- How you would assess current product health across reliability, payment success, onboarding, device activation, developer integration, support burden, and merchant outcomes.

- How you would identify the most important customer pain points and separate urgent operational issues from longer-term product opportunities.

- How you would sequence the first 30, 60, and 90 days without disrupting existing roadmap commitments or live payment operations.

- How you would establish owners, decision forums, dependencies, escalation paths, and cross-functional rituals.

- What launch, rollback, incident-response, compliance, and hardware/logistics risks you would watch closely.

- How you would define go/no-go criteria and communicate progress to leadership, teams, and customer-facing groups.

The goal is to demonstrate a practical execution mindset: structured discovery, clear prioritization, strong cross-functional leadership, disciplined risk management, and the ability to build confidence in the first 90 days while operating a mission-critical payments product.