Group UX Review and Walking the Store
Taste the soup together — experience the product as a group, log issues live, then debate each one.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 90%
An escalation of friction logging from a solo async exercise to a shared one. The team that built the product, their cross-functional partners, and leadership go through the real flow together as a specific user, dropping issues into a shared live log while a PM drives. At the end, the group works through each issue and decides what actually needs addressing. Walking the store is the whole-company version, run in an all-hands. Its main output is not the issue list — it is a shared, calibrated bar for craft.
Origin
David Singleton's practice at Stripe, which Shreyas Doshi singled out as something Singleton was notably good at when he joined. The 'taste the soup' analogy was told to Singleton by someone else; 'walk the store' is drawn from retail leadership practice.
Core principles
- 01If you run a restaurant you taste the soup; if you run a movie studio you watch movies together. Looking at your product together is the equivalent professional obligation.
- 02The group review teaches the bar for craft in a way no written value statement can.
- 03Cross-functional partners (support, partnerships, legal, risk) must be in the room, because at infrastructure companies they materially shape the product.
- 04Anchor every piece of feedback in the user experience you are trying to deliver — this is the defence against senior remarks being over-weighted.
- 05A value only becomes real when there is a predictable, repeating practice behind it.
How to run it
- 1
Assemble the builders and their cross-functional partners
Bring in the team that built it plus the people who will live with it — support staff who will field the questions, partnerships, and the org's executives.
- 2
Adopt one specific user and walk the flow live
The PM usually drives, walking everyone through the end-to-end experience while the group imagines itself as one particular user — the same persona discipline as a solo friction log.
Watch out Without a named persona the session decays into personal preference and pixel-arguing.
- 3
Collect issues into a shared live log
Anyone can type into a running issue log during the walkthrough. This captures reactions in the moment without derailing the flow.
Pro tip Let people log silently while the walkthrough continues — interrupting for every item costs you the rest of the flow.
- 4
Debate each issue at the end
Once the walkthrough is done, go through the log item by item and openly discuss: does this need to be addressed, and what do we really think about it?
- 5
Anchor all feedback in user experience
As the senior person, deliberately frame every comment as 'what's the user experience we're trying to deliver, and does this actually matter?' — because a stray remark from a leader who ICs rarely see will get over-weighted and taken out of context.
Pro tip For presenters: put your user's hat on. Anchoring an out-of-the-blue question back to what you're trying to do for users is what makes a high-stakes review go well.
Watch out The primary failure mode of a CTO-attended review is not harshness — it is an offhand comment becoming a team's priority for a quarter.
- 6
Scale it to walking the store
Periodically run the same exercise with the whole company. Stripe has done series of these inside its weekly Friday Fireside all-hands, walking through critical product flows and discussing how they reflect the company's priorities.
Pro tip Bring actual users into the start of the all-hands and ask them for feedback in front of everyone.
In the wild
Stripe runs a weekly, optional-but-well-attended company meeting called Friday Fireside. Singleton has run series where the whole company goes through genuinely critical product flows together, with a specific user experience at the core, and discusses how the flow reflects the priorities and trade-offs the company is making.
→ It gives everyone a shared language for talking about product quality and gets the company on the same page — which is what lets thousands of people working in parallel still produce a cohesive whole.
Someone once described the practice to Singleton this way: if you were a chef, you would taste the soup and talk to your kitchen staff about what went into it when it was good and when it wasn't. If you run a movie studio, you sit down and watch a lot of movies together.
→ The analogy reframes group product review from an audit into a craft-teaching ritual — the mechanism by which a bar for quality is transmitted at scale.
Common mistakes
Making it a leadership audit instead of a shared tasting
If the session reads as executives grading the team, presenters optimise for surviving the meeting rather than surfacing the truth about the experience, and you lose the calibration benefit entirely.
Excluding the non-product functions
Support, partnerships, legal and risk shape what the product can actually be at an infrastructure company. Reviewing without them produces decisions that get reversed later.
Declaring a value without a practice behind it
Singleton's core observation: it being a value matters, but you need a predictable, regular practice behind it or the value never becomes real for anyone.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and engineering leaders at scaling companies whose teams ship in parallel and whose product experience is starting to diverge across surfaces.
Not ideal for
Teams small enough that everyone already uses the whole product daily, or organisations where psychological safety is low enough that a group review becomes performance theatre.
From the transcript
“there's something that that that we do occasionally and and I've done it occasionally at Stripe called walk the store, where we'll actually do that…”
“we have a a log of issues that we want to talk about that that anyone can type into while the PM usually is walking…”
“if you were a chef, you're going to you're going to taste the soup, and you're going to talk to your kitchen staff about like…”
From the episode
Building a culture of excellence
David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)