YouSaid · the spoken record

Archie Abrams

lines on the record: 83
first: 2024-11-07
most recent: 2024-11-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So On social media, but on LinkedIn, check me out, send me a message. And then, yeah, if folks are hiring a bunch of folks, growth marketers, PMs, engineers, data folks, UXers, you want to work at Shopify and growth or other parts, fully remote. So we'd love to have great people join.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, who I'm like a lot is like a father, and he was a So appreciative about his leadership style was the empathy and curiosity and kindness that he showed and everything. And I hope in some of the stories that of him. No matter who anyone was, like curious, love to engage and learn from. And I hope that's something I try to take inspiration from is like just. With everyone kind and learn from everyone you're with it around. I think about”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been come back to the plan is the plan until it's not. And it's basically like we have a plan. It's the plan, it's our best, let's commit to it. Acknowledg Might change and we'll deal with it then, but it's got a combination of like we have a plan, stay focused on that with also the acknowledgement that you can need to be flexible and try to combine those two sometimes contradictory things of focus, plan with. Got to be able to react in an effective way.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the AI music creator, my kids and I, I'm the least musical person in the world. It's been amazing. My kids and I will create songs together about our days, about what's going on. So it's just been really fun to be able to have a musical experience for non-musical person and have that creative experience for them. And it's been really awesome to use.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I went back in time and I watched for the first time actually the entire season or all the episodes of the Sopranos. Which was quite fun, highly recommend. I did that in the wire in the last like six months.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the perfect mile about the chase for a sub four minute mile by Roger Bannister and a few other folks. Is it just a wonderful as a runner? It's a really fun book to read about kind of perseverance, how these folks really have all competed to get to that really amazing goal of under four minutes in a mile.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I love to go back to marketers who wrote in like the 1920s. And so one that I love is scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins. So it's basically one of the first kind of direct marketers that came out. He kind of innovated on some of the concepts of copywriting and just how you like sell a product around can't make this product, can't sell the product. Can you tell the product will help the customer achieve their goals. And so it's really fun. I find it really fun to go back in time because there's a lot of really good first principles thinking that I think we've actually lost in more modern stuff where it's like personalization bandits, optimization, all this stuff. How do you actually write and sell things really effectively? So scientific advertising is a great book.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Urgency, you can let people make that emotional journey by the act of purchasing, which allowed us to actually have very good retention because you could keep coming back to that emotional job over and over again, which discounting with urgency allowed us to do.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you could signal very high, signal quality through price, which was very murky at that point in online learning. Signal value through price, discount it to 10 bucks, or that was the typical Udemy deal. And then, so 99% off, 90% off, we might see like fire sales, but it changed the value and willingness to pay. And then it tapped into the fact that and still is, education is very aspirational. And so what a lot of people missed in that education is, yes, we want people to actually take the course. But that's actually in many cases not the job to be done, that there's an emotional job that's even more important, which is I'm feeling like I'm making progress in my educational journey. And just the act of purchasing a course or the act of buying a book is progress. And so if you can make it very enticing. High value thing, cheap.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So Udemy is a very online marketplace for online courses. So come on, course. And I think what was happening in, you know, I started and we were there 2012-ish was people were like, what is this online course? I don't really understand what it is. I don't understand what the value is and what I'm going to pay. And so discounting as a really powerful effect on is it can signal value with a high list price, but then bring something down to an affordable price. And that may seem like, of course, that's obvious, but in online courses, what was important is the list price would be high 100 bucks, it was associated with like a college course. But what people really value this thing as with a book.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it only works because. Intuition on what the brand is, needs to be. And all of that, that some of what the CMO does of kind of creating the cohesive story of Shopify. Got in their heads and kind of they have the pen on that. And so that allows then, that piece that CMO's job to not be as important at Shopify, but the other pieces are obviously critical, but they can be now closer to the action and where they're kind of going to drive the most impact. The downside is things are sometimes very messy. So that's the.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The benefit is that there's growth marketing who sits in growth, there's revenue marketing who sits over closer to sales, there's a brand team under Harley who does amazing work, our president. There's marketing embedded in core and PMM sit with product managers there. There's shop marketing on a consumer side. So marketing is truly. Everywhere in the org. And I think the benefit of it is its closest to the primary kind of goal that those marketers are trying to do, right? They sit with growth so we can focus on kind of that self-service motion. Harley is an amazing communicator, so brand sits with him so it can be, he can have a lot of influence over that. And so I think it sits with the people that's most relevant outcomes are driving, which is great because it allows us move faster with less kind of coordination.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You assign value to a given touch point, right? Click a view, et cetera. But it doesn't tell you causally what drove something. That's where incrementality tells you. Incrementality test is basically don't show ads on meta for certain summer people. Show it to the other set, see what the lift is in the outcome. And so a lot of what we're doing is trying to get a lot, is continuing to get even more sophisticated in incrementality measurement for not just self-serve outcomes, but for self-service outcomes that then drive to sales for sales specific outcomes. And as soon as we have that kind of incrementality at the channel level, we can get a lot more sophisticated in terms of our Bidding budgeting and all that. But that's really the key thing we want to get to.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My rant is I am a multitouch attribution has its place. I think ideally we want to get through is what we really care about is incriminality. And so incrementality is kind of the gold standard of people who are less like attribution measures”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of moving things around, even though it's the right thing to do. So, a lot of it is in rebuilding instrumentation, how we do LTV modeling, how we do attribution, how we do incrementality testing across each of those different types of outcomes, because it was not kind of an intuitive thing for us. Originally, because we built all these systems with a much more.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. So I think that breaks his. Drive someone to from an ad over to self service. We typically look at only the self-service. That person. But what happens if they come in, they sign up via self service and then they go talk to sales. Get changed to a sales driven merchant, which means that that value of that merchant, which is usually actually quite large, does not get associated back to that ad campaign. Oh, guess what? That means you would probably reduce investment on that ad campaign. You weren't valuing that because their system had two different models for calculating LTV, still driven one and a self service one. Uh oh, we're going to make suboptimal investment decisions now by”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's broken a lot of metrics in the business. That's broken a lot of ways people have thought about their jobs. And so there's been a lot of kind of cultural resetting and just getting smarter from a metric standpoint about how do we measure this thing of hybrid journey that came in via self-service. They went over to sales. How do we value each of those components in the process? And transparently, it's something we're still getting better at, but it's really important to get there.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, one of the last things last year we've been really doing is how to create these hybrid journeys where there is, we shouldn't force the merchant to choose, do you want to talk to sales or do you want to do self-service? We should give them the options, whatever path that they want to go on. And so a lot of that has been building into the self-service journey over to sales and then from sales into self-service.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With sales and say it's really hard to use as much quantitative data to make some growth to make some of those decisions. And so a lot of it has been building much for qualitative insights, working with merchant success, sales about the challenges they're facing and onboarding a large customer. So how do we build import tools that work for them? How do we make sure they have the right guidance in the product for a very different set of use cases? So a lot of it's just been like very much empathy building with sales about what that merchant journey looks like. And quite frankly, challenging ourselves to think differently. It's been one thing. And then second, we kind of built two very distinct funnels for a little bit. There's like a sales funnel. You come in, you contact us, that's it. There's no mention of self-service. There's no this. It's just like drive MQLs, boom. Then there's the self-service thing. There's no mention of sales anywhere.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it has been great over the last couple years as built out the Sales Org that it's added a whole new kind of motion to Shop-Fi as Shopify's product got better. It can serve the biggest companies in the world. It was like the natural evolution. Well, we're going to do that for people to grow up on Shopify to be the biggest companies, but we're also going to take folks, another platform, bring them over. For growth in sales, I think the... Biggest learning from the kind of RD side at least has been the scale is very different.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it needs to have a very opinionated. Founder or set of people who are driving what good looks like. I think if it is, and I think Shopify, you know, a few years ago and before maybe sometimes drifted into the mode of we are just going to build stuff in each kind of team is just going to build stuff, not really accountable for it. And that is a very, very bad state to end up. So I think you either have to use my sense is metrics as accountability, which is the most common kind of way to drive accountability and focus or extremely strong. Founder or set of folks who have extremely strong opinions on what good is and what taste is If you have one of those two, you can make it work. But the worst case is let's just go build a bunch of cool stuff and kind of a haphazard. That I don't think would work.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The wizard principle without creating actual wizard. So that's been some of the, how do we work together to get the intent of what the growth is, but in a way that's consistent with the way we want to build in core.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wizards do serve a purpose in certain circumstances. And so we've avoided doing that, but we've always worked to try to make the principles of what a wizard does really well, which is it simplifies the product into something that allows people to have a lower bar, to try to work with core to bring that into the actual experience itself. So the example of that experiment I mentioned to you of giving pre-filled sections in the online store editor, you could have solved that in a wizardy way of like enter a few things and we're going to generate these sections for you. Instead, Actually, took those pre-generated things based on what we know about you and put it into the actual product experience itself. So it tried to get at some of the principles or what a wizard can do well without avoiding.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place that we often come back to is, and this is with, you know, I think Toby has great Toby and Glenn, is on wizards. So wizards Onboarding carousels, some way that basically has folks. Get set up by not using the actual product. And so we've always kind of danced around and we have very specific no wizard principle. But I think that sometimes the tension is.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And it's like, okay, so how are we going to, how are we going to work to figure this out? It might be, hey, we're going to move the button. Hey, let's run the test. But see the short-term lift. You know we're going to monitor it long term. You know when we ship it, it's going to be high quality, like high quality polished. Okay, you trust us to make those trade-offs. And I wish I had a better answer of like, it's very human, right? And it's very that trust. That's very important. Any of these, I think, growth with other teams is like there's no replacement for just the human. Trust and then following through on commitments, no, we're actually going to make this thing really good.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Together to figure out that quality bar to understand when you're going to be different on it on the quality bar to get something out to learn and just building trust along the way that we're actually going to chip high quality things when we ship it to 100% and move. And so a lot of great work on the team to make those relationships really strong.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, honestly, it's been one of the things I'm very proud of. Like we built a really great partnership over the last three and a half years because it's intentionally meant to be almost at odds. And that's like part of the structure of how you want to work. But it comes from, I think, a place of respect on both sides, and I say, for anyone, it's, okay, here's what growth is going to do. We're going to do it in a way that is high quality, that is shipping really good stuff for merchants. We're probably going to approach it in a in a faster way. We might disagree on things, but we're going to have reasonable paths to kind of handle that conflict. And so there's no magic bullet. It wasn't like these are the surfaces that growth can touch. These are not, it's like, you can go anywhere in the product, but. Go figure out how”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so big kind of additions twice a year, obviously continually shipping, but we kind of package them twice a year in a big.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And that's what we'd come together every six weeks. Of everyone in person to review every project so we can hash out those disagreements, go through all the core projects, all the merged service products, all the growth projects. And it's a great form to say, hey, here's where we disagree really on the how and the tactics of what's happening. And we can flag those things, have good debates about where there might be misalignment.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get it done. And every project, so you got a core project, you got merging service, you got a growth project. And the expectation is that the group leads. Every single project that goes out has a few minute video with Figmas and everything and everything that shipped needs to be okay tuned, so approved by the group lead. There's nothing that can ship without that OK2 approval. And that OK2 approval has to be Glenn, Carl, myself, different groups. And so that is kind of how everything is reviewed. Now, of course, there's great amazing teams that do amazing work, but it is kind of that's how the system works.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Or he's very involved in everything. Yeah, and I think this is the fun thing about Shopify. Literally, like we have our own internal project management system that's been kind of crafted just for Shopify and every ship.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. Glenn, who's heads of core product, I mean, one of the things that's so impressive about Glenn and kind of that core team is they go incredibly deep into every single release that is shipped. And so you have, do you have a central kind of ion, the quality and how it all fits together? And so that, I think, helps make sure there's a consistent kind of bar for taste. That's Glenn, a bunch of folks, Toby, obviously, that kind of can enforce that. So it creates, it's subjective, but it's objective in the sense that it's kind of a small number of people who really hold what that bar is and needs to be. I think if it's just subjective, let's just ship what we want without kind of a couple people really holding that quality and that taste bar, that's where things go really sideways.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the upside of that is I think we tend to ship things in core and that are incredibly Facing and it would take more risk. I think to acknowledge some of the downside of it though is sometimes conversations get extremely subjective about what is the right thing to do. And so that requires kind of the right way of having kind of good discussions, kind of openness from all leaders and from teams to debate those things. But it does result in some squishiness, which again, as is pros and cons, the kind of taste is kind of what drives a lot of what we're shipping in core.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. It's funny, we ramped against KPIs or basically banned as an OKRs or banned and all that. So, you know, and so certainly like in growth, you have the metrics, but they take a different form. And then in core, it truly is. We have conviction that this is the right technical foundation to build the future of commerce? And that is built through certainly looking at data. So it's not that teams are not looking at data and using it as a piece of their puzzle, but it's not the overriding. And when we go to ship a feature in core, it's not like a team is held accountable for. This metric over this six months, it's much more do we ship the right thing and we're going to kind of get at that through a variety of lenses. It could be some of that, could be data, qualitative, just our own product sense of what's good or not. And so”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's like in the last one, we had a, it was great. We had a 30 minute discussion about how to build CSV importers for people coming over from different platforms. And it was all about are we using an open source library, doing it internally? Are we doing it in the core code base? Are we building a separate first party app to do it? It was incredible detail. This is what's amazing about Toby. The technical detail of how we're going to do this was incredibly important to get right to kind of set up this type of infrastructure. And most companies would be, okay, what? You're going to make it easier for people to migrate their data over cool. Team go figure out the how. Team does forget how we work on it with kind of Toby in the details as to how it's so important to how we build for the future.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How and set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable, flexible, that is incredibly valuable over the long term. It means we will sometimes take longer to ship a future. It means we will not chase kind of certain deals or what have you, but we're going to kind of make that investment. And it comes through in all of our reviews and just how we kind of do our work together.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of very much just imbued in the culture. It's almost everything kind of feels that way. And I'll give like, practically speaking, every six weeks, all the kind of R&D group leads, we get together and we sit with Toby and each other in review every single project across the company, every six weeks, every single R&D pull up the dashboard and look at it. And in that conversation, so much of the conversation is about both the technical how are we building this in a way that allows for Shopify to have optionality in the technical decisions that we are making. And I think for Toby, one of the things I've learned is that the how, the technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the kind of what and who we're building for. If you build the right kind of technical”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of revenue right away. But if you're thinking about the long term 100 years from now, guess what? All the big brands of today. Be out of business. Many of them will be out of business in 30, 40, 50 years. The real success of Shopify is getting every To start with us and go, but making that type of investment and being so focused on that entrepreneur segment and making it easier is how we build kind of a very, very long term oriented company. So just even how we do capital investment, how we do product decision making comes back to, hey, we can't chase. Have the short term, even more concrete things.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That slide comes up, you probably have seen that slide 10,000 times, but it's an important reminder, like jobs to build the best product for merchants over the long period of time. And then all of kind of the metrics and kind of the make money part of it, secondary to that, so we care about that long term piece. It ties a little bit to that, that original conversation about kind of entrepreneurs and being the core of like, why we just want more people to start businesses and go, it's very seductive, I think, in kind of most companies, including in Shopify, because we can support large enterprise businesses today, right? Big brands who want to get off outdated solution and come over to Shopify. It's very easy to just say, oh, that's very concrete. There's an existing business. We want to have them come join Shopify. And in the short term, it feels really good because it brings a lot of...”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. This is all come as all Toby of really making sure Shopify is so oriented around we are here to build a hundred year company. And so the decisions we're going to make are really oriented towards the long-term success of merchants, of Shopify, embedded in all of our principles are make the best product in the world, make money to do more of one, never reverse principles two and three in every kind of executive meeting, every town hall.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our culture of kind of like aim, kind of aim heavy, the intuition is right that this probably is helping merchants, why do we start with that the original control was better for the neutral? Let's start with like what would we have shipped if we were a blank slate? And if it's neutral, actually neither is better. So let's just pick the one we feel better about and ship that.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, when we looked longer term on that, six months later, it had a pretty massive impact on the number of people who were selling and producing GMV. And why is that? Because it didn't likely really influence anyone to like. But the people who used it created better stores that were higher converting. And so they got early sales, but they actually converted one of their visitors and they got momentum, and they stuck with entrepreneurship a little bit longer. And we saw that in that opposite way. And so this is an example where that neutral. So we tend to ship neutral. It's like, it could be positive. And so let's let it go. If we have good intuition about it and it will turn. So we've seen a bunch of these things go and... Very different directions”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is great because we were spending, you know, we were going to spend a lot of time kind of okay. What else can we do here? It's like, no, actually. Fridge to fry in a lot of other areas. So just it helps the team just feel really good that their work is really the things that we're good. You know, another one that went the other way, which was really interesting, was in our online store, and this might be if you use Shopify. Sections and blocks that come preconfigured. And so we tested, okay, if we give you a preconfigured block of like you should have an image up top, then a text banner, and then a collage with your products, that should help folks understand what to do when they're building the online store. It actually had no lift in people converting to a paying merchant.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably weren't actually that dedicated to this entrepreneurship craft. They may have updated their credit card, but they still really weren't in it. And so that was a good example of in a bunch of this stuff around kind of payments, even quote, preventing churn where you look like a 6, 12, 18 months. On a GMV metric, not a lot of Lyft over that long term horizon.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think one good example is something around payment failure notification. So, one of the things that a lot of teams have or see is called dunning effects where somebody might have a payment not go through a credit card that doesn't go through. So we did a bunch of experimentation around, hey, how can we alert people that their credit card is failed, their payment attempt failed? And that's a typical kind of growth win usually produces a lot of short-term impact. And that's what we saw here. We were doing much better alerting, reminding people, sending them a million emails about it. Cool. We got some pretty major lift. You look back six, 12 months. Was really no longer lift. And why is that? Is there really a little bit of a selection bias there? The people who are letting that payment fail.”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's great learning. And that's why we take it. It's like, wow, okay, now we really uncovered something. And it's like such a successful discovery. Wow, okay, we thought this thing. But now we learned it actually wasn't as true as we thought. Cool, what can we take from that and be smarter next time so we don't just double down? The wrong”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that creates the loop of shipping value quickly, but making sure we're holding ourselves accountable to did this actually produce results over a long period or did it actually just have this? Mutual effect. It's like, oh, then we can learn from that and get better”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Group is held. We watch them, and that's where that ping comes back. Every experiment is watched, and that ping comes back”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They play with, but because they're measuring absolutes and they really think about that absolute value, we don't get caught into like, did your conversion rate over the course of this year go up or down? It's kind of irrelevant. What was the sum of the impact over a long period on that total core value that we're trying to produce from for merchants?”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over kind of cost and payback. So that's the macro point of view. And then within growth marketing, each channel operates with certain guardrails around their LTVD CACs. Same thing for content and SEO that operates with kind of a guardrail model for each piece of content. How much is that going to come back and down the line? For growth products, it's also a combination of total GP called incremental cohort value that's produced from those teams. So everything is basically going to be measured on an experiment, ideally measured over a very long time period. What was the incremental cohort value lift that this generated? And that's how we think about it and kind of measure the impact of each of those sub teams along the way. Each of those have a specific part of the”
2024-11-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source