YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Chu

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-06-27
most recent: 2022-06-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You can find me online, I guess, on Twitter at Brandon MCU. And be useful to me, I mean, the simplest answer for me, I guess, is like, I'm a pretty active angel investor. I have like six, seven invested in like 60 companies over the last five, six years. So if you're interested in an occasionally helpful angel investor, then hit me up, who's maybe a little bit too busy. But really, the honest answer is I don't need anything. I think if anyone's listening and they want to help me out, just go help some stranger in the world that needs it. I'd rather you do that. I think I've been so lucky in life that I don't want anything.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know like what HTML is or something like that, which I was one of those people that from right now over the weekend, you could build a clone of Twitter using like a tutorial on Ruby on Rails or something like that. You can do it. You may not know everything that's actually happening, right? But you could actually get that deployed and it'll work and it'll blow your mind that you did that. And I think like once people break through that wall when they're non-technical, I think the momentum builds from there. And so the side hustle and then also break technical walls or obscurity is what I would recommend.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, everyone has so many different backgrounds, but I'd say overall, based on most PMs that I've met, I'd say, look, this is hard to do when you are a PM somewhere, but like do a legitimate side hustle, found a company on the side and learn everything else, you know, because I think sometimes you're in this silo of your feature, your area, or whatnot, and you forget what it means to sell something to a customer, what it means to support a product, what it means to ship something and get destroyed because it doesn't even work or something like that. And so I think it humbles you a bit. It reminds you of how hard it is to build software and how many people it takes to do that well. And especially if you're non-technical, you know, like really lean into it and build something simple. Learn how to build something simple for yourself. Demystify the technology. That experience will take you far. Like I love telling people that literally don't even.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“UI kit or something like that. Like, you're going to see the good and the bad that comes out of that UI kit being given to the third party ecosystem. And you'll learn about consumer. And so, you know, I also think oscillating between them is an amazing experience too because, you know, there are really long cycles in platform work. And sometimes it's nice to shift and iterate and grow week over week and talk to your users about every single feature that you're shipping every other week. And that's so fun in different ways. And so I think having both is actually the right goal, both experiences.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really tough question. I think if you have any particular interest in the types of problems that you solve, like, you know, I give you a little snapshot of the things you think about as a platform PM, that stuff gets you really interested, then follow that guy. I don't think it's either or. I don't think one is better than the other. I think they're completely different types of problem domains. I don't think it's also a one-way door. I'd say even if you do primarily user facing or consumer facing side of the product, you're going to be consuming things on some platform somewhere, whether it's an internal API or a third party or whatnot. So you're going to experience platforms good and bad, right? And so you'll learn about it. And then alternatively on the platform side, you're going to be designing the canvas and you're going to see what gets built there. And you're going to learn what are good and bad bounds of not a single user experience, but a universe of user experiences that are possible, like if you create.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across apps, and it's important that actually you push that data back into Shopify so that you don't hold that data back from so that this other app can't use it and now we're sending the same end customer to marketing texts when they've already opted out of marketing texts or something like that. And so this is where you have to understand those principles and the stack rank of the constituents there to be able to make good policy and design choices. And I think it's something that If you're not conscious of early as a platform PM, you will blow up some stuff or there will be some bad instances that come up or you'll get blocked by the CEO or whatever on the day before it launches, which has happened too.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A pretty big important intro principle is that if there's ever a toss up between deciding between the seller and a buyer, the consumer, we're going to side with the consumer, right? That's why every time you refund something on Amazon, you get it. Anytime you got a complaint, send you another one, right? Like they made that trade-off to be a consumer focused platform. And obviously that's been amazing for them. But you also hear the contrasting stories of sellers that are really pissed off at Amazon that have like ruined their businesses and whatnot. Okay, so not to hate on that. But that's just that's a second order effect of that decision. In Shopify's case, we are here to support entrepreneurs and businesses in making their dreams come true and creating independence. And that is sometimes at the cost of developers on our platform. And so sometimes we may make like a data policy change saying like, hey, it's more important that the merchant has access to this data.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enjoy that process and also find ways to celebrate rewards along the way like we would, not our rewards, but celebrate shipping things along the way. When that API went into Alpha, you know, there's no press release. But how do you make the team feel amazing about that work? You have to tell the big narrative about like this is going to change how merchants actually get different apps in these areas or whatnot. And like here's some of the crazy things that we've seen in the early adoption, et cetera. So that's my main thing on psychology. I'd say in terms of preparing yourself, you really have to think about before you even get into like the technical or design execution of any particular platform area. Really think about the principles behind the platform that you're building. So an example and then a contrast with Shopify is like in Amazon's platform. I'm making this up, but I assume that”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually say the first thing is as a PM, your psychology has to really change around your own validation. So usually you can build a product, ship it, customers tell you if it's good or not. The cycles for platform work are five to ten times longer. Maybe changing something on the infrastructure level, then opening up an API and then doing an alpha period for the API where developers now build on that and test things. And then you move into a beta. And then finally, two years later, some end customer actually uses that app for this. And you're not designing actually the end user's experience. You're designing a canvas for developers to build their own creative ideas on. And it's just a very different type of work. And so I would say that's the first thing psychologically is like be prepared for those much longer cycles, surround yourself with people on your teams that find ways to”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, when you long press on an app on your iPhone and it has a short cut list of things you could do quicker, right? Like, okay, say if you long press your email app, it'll probably say like create new email as one of them. Like that's an extension. That's iOS saying, hey, Gmail app, I'm going to give you the ability to actually deep link this experience into your app through our operating system, right? Someone actually had to design that idea, that user experience. And we just take it for granted because that's how it works, right? But there's so many crazy decisions there about like, well, if you go too far, you give Google too much control there and they could do some really messed up stuff. Or if you don't go far enough, then it's really just lame, right? It's not actually powerful. And so this is a really interesting domain.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hope to write something about that. And that's even on just like the peer strategy and kind of economic view of it. But then there's also these super fascinating product design and engineering problems of just like, okay, you have this web app or whatever and you want apps to exist in it. Well, how are they going to exist in it, right? Okay, you can, are you just going to let them put their link in there and then it opens up a new tab into that other product? That's kind of lame. That's basically like a Facebook comment of a link. Or are you going to allow the actual third party product to exist inside of your product? And how are you going to do that? Is it going to be an iframe? Well, that's kind of janky. If it's going to be deeper, then now we're talking about like direct data integration. We're talking about maybe your app serving you on behalf of that app, but then some of the data comes from the third party server. And like, it gets really, really interesting in terms of user experience and whatnot. And people, it's actually quite common in our life that we don't think about it.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll probably be really long, but just like a huge post about being a platform PM as opposed to a product PM. And there's so many interesting differences in the ways that you have to think about prioritization and like I even told a story about like, you know, it's a big cultural change to that you have to affect people way beyond your team. Now you have to also work and you have to work multi-party. So like you're building a, let's say, a developer platform that they're building apps. Okay, now there's multiple stakeholders. So like the developers building these apps that are going to be consumed by these businesses, these merchants. And these apps also may all be presented to end buyers. There's now three constituents and there's all these crazy things around like policy, data sharing, just like tension between like which side gets economically rewarded for doing what. Like there's a lot of really interesting things. And so one day.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely is still the way work. I'd probably do it too much in terms of use my judgment. It's like, oh, that isn't important. Because over time, too, you get weathered down about like what's actually super dire versus not. Once you've had a few battle scars of things that you thought were going to ruin everything your career, your reputation, blah, blah, blah, and then actually nothing happened. You just start to raise that bar about what's actually important.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“98, 99 of them, you should basically spend all your time on those very few important decisions. And for all other decisions, you just literally just go with whatever your gut is or delegate it. Because it's just like you're only human and your gut is going to be right a decent amount of time too. And so just make those fasts so that you can keep the team velocity high. You don't ever want to be a blocker. That's the other tension and then spend all your time on these like few critical.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I have a favorite, but the one that always just like I'd say has overall had the most traction or just like constantly even to today people still tweet about or message me about whatever was the one about making good decisions as a PM. Basically the short of it is like the first thing it argues is that the most important thing to figure out when you're dealing with any decision is actually like figuring out how important that decision is right since we're faced with hundreds of decisions in any given moment around the product or whatever and that we're only human and we can only prioritize a few you know you got to figure out the importance of them so you can prioritize and so it talks about things like decision reversible or not does it affect a lot of users and in a material way or not stuff like that ways to kind of like prioritize them basically and then it kind of argues that okay given the fact that we only have limited time and that the most important decisions are so much more important than the other”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, to be perfectly transparent about it, it is a factor in why I stop writing. It had gained so much traction and I was so like I had become an exec now shopped by and I was so busy at them. I was like, I don't have the time to make this thing as good as it was. And I'm not even going to put another post up because I just, I don't want to disappoint people. Like that's a real thing. I think you're probably better conditioned with this, like having written 300 posts now. I think you're a machine. But for me, it was like I would put a one every couple months maximum or something like that. And so when I lost the time, I had kids and all these types of things, like it seemed insurmountable to prioritize.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'd say even if it never got picked up, the ROI is already huge because it just, again, helps you refine how you talk about the work and decisions. But that aside, it accelerated my career probably a decade.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get more because we're a very small company of them, so we're using any angle we can. So I'm writing on my personal blog about this thing that we launched. And David Marcus, who's now like leading their blockchain crypto stuff, but he was CEO of PayPal for a while and then he came in to lead all the Facebook's payment stuff and Messenger, oh sorry, to lead Messenger. Anyway, he shared it on his Facebook and on Twitter. And then that blew up. And, you know, all of a sudden the CPO of Shopify, like Craig or whatever, now starts thinking I'm legit, even though because someone like, you know, of his caliber was also sharing these things about a product that we built and whatnot. So like it was just like, it was really interesting how these little things had an impact on how people perceive you and thus how much impact and momentum you can create inside a company.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of the way that those posts gain traction and whatnot. So it has had an incredible, incredible impact on my personal career. And also, I think it has brought a lot of really great people to Shopify. Like literally every week, I do PM messages me and says, like, hey, I just joined, you know, your post had a lot of influence on me or whatever. And I'd love to meet up and blah, blah, blah. But that has, it's been amazing. And it's so rewarding. Another small example, this wasn't in the black box product management, like general canon or whatever per se, but I was working on the integration product with Facebook Messenger via Shopify. And like as part of our launch, I wrote”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pre onboarded a lot of the PMs that would join my team because, like, you know, obviously they're going to look for who their lead is and Google that a bit and they see a posting of like, you know, is this person legit or not or whatever? And so I didn't really even have to onboard many people in so many ways. They kind of knew how I thought about the world. And also even when I was in Shopify and writing those posts, there was so much noise in Shopify. It's a very chaotic place. There's so many exciting things happening that it is very hard to like tell 200 person PM or stop, pay attention to this idea, right? So I actually found that writing externally and getting momentum externally was a better way to influence internally what was happening. To the effect that Toby would read my post here and there and he'd be like, great post. And I'd be like, hey, Daddy loves me. But no, but seriously, it would help build my trust battery with Toby.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is in our little internal wiki thing. So I'm literally ancient in the company. And so one of the amazing effects that the writing had was that people that would join my team already knew how I thought.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's honestly been the most important thing I've ever done in my career, unbelievably. It has had probably two really interesting effects. One is that as Shopify grew and like, you know, when we were going through hyperscale, you probably recognize these from your Airbnb days as well, but like people are falling from the sky. Every day there's 20 new people showing up. And like, you know, you having been there already, like now you've got to figure out what all these people are doing and give them all the context and all these types of things and how do you even teach them like the culture and the ways that you work and stuff like this. And so one amazing and like just the context like I'm really old at Shopify now. I'm like 99.1% tenure. So I'm like ancient at the company.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think yes, even if it's not to be publicly shared or whatnot, I think ultimately, especially in an increasingly digital world and increasingly remote world, you've got to be able to articulate yourself. Again, like even going back to that process of writing and what it does for how you understand what you're saying, you owe your team, your peers, your stakeholders that level of clarity. So even if you write it and throw it away, you've created the clarity in your mind and you can articulate it as such and people deserve that. And I think that if you're going to be a really good PM, you have to have that skill.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no better Well, it's a symbiotic relationship, right? All those questions and feedback from your subscribers and whatnot is fodder for the next thing that you're going to give. And I think that's an amazing relationship.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a release too because when you write it down, you just kind of release it from your mind. It's not floating around there because I'm scared to lose it or something like that. And you kind of just like now you cleared your mind and you can actually think, you build on top of that knowledge into something else.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It on the weekends, or like I brain dumped a first draft of it in two hours and I do 38 hours of editing or getting feedback from people or drawing some shitty diagrams that I put in there. But it was that process and I think it was such an amazing thing to learn how to do is to like just sit and write for five hours and reread the thing and actually also get feedback from people like don't be so afraid to share raw early thoughts and for it to kind of not make sense. But then when you give to someone objective and they read it, they'll be like, you really learn things about how you put a narrative together in your mind versus how someone actually reacts to it. And so that fearlessness to get a lot of feedback I think was something I developed through those years.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it took me to really interesting places, and I think it was also coupled with two things which was like I had a really good career trajectory at the same time. So I could actually observe, like I wasn't too mired in like being a PM1 for five years and then moving. I was like moving through things really quickly. So I was able to contrast things because it was literally like, oh, wait, three months ago, it was that. Now how do I change? And that, of course, is not just me, but it's also because Shopify grew so much during that time, right? Like we grew seven years ago. I came at just under 500 people. We're over 12,000 people today. And so it was a really formative time for the whole company and definitely myself. And in terms of just like writing well and shipping quality posts and stuff like that, I'm sure this resonates with you. You just got to put in the work. You've got to put in a lot of hours. into a post”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I wrote those in a time where I was figuring out a lot of stuff while I was executing. And I wanted to like crystallize in my mind some mental models and frameworks that had been forming somewhat intuitively. Like the funny thing about those posts when I reflect on them and I've rarely reread them, but every once in a while, you know, someone shares an excerpt and I end up kind of rereading and be like, do I even believe this still? But when people read them, they think like, oh, they're learning from someone who's figured it out for a while. And now they're sharing it later in their career or something. But the reality is, and maybe this resonates with you, it's like, I think it's everything in those posts at the exact moment I wrote them. It was the writing process itself that actually allowed me to solidify those mental models in those frameworks in my mind. And so I wasn't ahead of the game in any way. It was just, I think I really wanted to disambiguate the chaos in my mind about what my job was.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, thank you. That's like super generous. I think if you save him in the top 1%, then Lenny, you're definitely in the top 0.1 or 0.01%. And also thank you for being generous saying I've slowed down a bit. The reality is I haven't written anything since 2018. So when I reflect on it.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know the exact answer, but I would imagine so we also use trip actions inside of Shopify, and I'm pretty sure they have an API. So probably we've done something directly with them. So they've handled all the link. Really complex stuff, but we probably use them for the booking action itself.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boardrooms and whatever you want to have your little off site or whatever it may be. And then there's like a rating system after how was the burst there? There's a whole team that manages the logistics of all these things so that it's very just like we don't have managers all over the company trying to like figure out flight plans and stuff like that. And yeah, it's great. And we also get the data to be able to see what teams haven't been together in a very long time and like ask the lead like, hey, why is that? Is it because everything's good? And like, you know, people are busy. Maybe some people have a baby or something like that and they can't get around or is it a prompt that, hey, maybe your energy is low as a team and it's time to get together. So that's the benefit, I think, of like having built that app and that infrastructure is that we get to really understand how it's actually helping.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate saying that it is all in house because that is not easy accessible for midsize or below companies. But basically you initiate an event called a burst. You can choose what type of thing like you're trying to do, whether it's like a pure work thing or you want to have a little bit of activity and social aspects of it. There's different locations depending on how many people are going that are available to you. There's a booking system. If you choose to do something a little more low key and just meet in let's say a major city, then we actually allow you to access our old offices. So the leases didn't go away. So we had to use these offices for something and these offices have now completely been retrofitted. They're beautiful and they are like, I wouldn't even say coworking spaces. They're just community spaces now that you go in and you can use them and like you have everything. There's food there like there used to be. There's”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could try. I mean, we've done other things too, like, you know, because you spoke in Bahamas, like, I actually worked out of the Caribbean for five weeks in March. And because we also had a policy that we instituted that said, for 90 days out of the year, you can work in any country you want. And so what we tried to do with a remote-only world is like we tried to turn all the weaknesses on its head and to say like, okay, well, we can't see each other every day, but let's remember all the ways that sucked from a commute perspective. And like even when you were together, if you're just working in your desk and never even talking to each other, that wasn't great. So why don't we just like optimize for the stuff that was amazing about it and make it super easy and fun. And that's what bursts became. And then, hey, we don't want, you know, we have amazing infrastructure now. We can work with global teams 24-7, 365. Why are we forcing people to stay in a location? I mean, the reality is the 90 day thing is mostly because of like a tax thing.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like in France and Ireland, I'll leave a little bit to the imagination, but it's really cool. So, you know, we started allowing kind of that as the world opened up for travel. And like now teams are doing it all the time. I'm going next week, actually, to one with our team.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny enough that in person still matters. It does. And that doesn't mean we're rolling back at all. The fact that we're remote only, but what we've done is we've actually instituted something we call bursts. So bursts at Shopify are the ability for your team, generally like maybe once a quarter or whatnot, to just come together to do really high velocity creative work together to hang out together. And so we've gone like pretty far on this where we actually have like in-house built web and mobile apps that allow teams to one click, say I have like 20 people. We want to do a burst in Laguna Beach and then click the button and then like flights get booked, hotels get booked, food is taken care of, no one has to pay like any like there's no expenses that go back and forth. The app itself helps you check into those places and we have really cool experiences.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say the edge came off a little bit, I think like mid 2021. Like, it wasn't that long ago, actually, maybe about a year ago, that it started. I would say it never really left wartime per se. But it sort of became like everyone sort of adjusted to it. And so many other things were happening because we had offices before and we made the decision very early in the pandemic to say like we're never going to have offices again. We're a digital by default company higher anywhere in the world. Let's make sure we have really great infrastructure. And so there were so many things happening inside the company that just changed. It's changed overnight. Shopify, the experience, the culture of the company changed overnight. And so it's hard to say when it stopped. It just evolved.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so these things exist in our Shopify in apps because they were never really like mission critical. But now it became really mission critical. So all of a sudden we're like trying to gear 500 people towards ship gift cards, which sounds like a really small feature, but it's pretty hard when you have millions of merchants and hundreds of millions of consumers using your platform every day, ship it in two weeks. And so it became wartime, truly. And like, yes, Toby got way more involved as the Craig Miller, our CPO at the time. And we went down from trying to ship maybe the 40 things that quarter to like free. And nothing else mattered. And that became sort of the rhythm of the company for almost that entire year.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pick up at the curb? How do we help them launch buy gift cards now at a discount so that basically you can, as a consumer, help these companies stay afloat? Like if you recall back in 2020, like that was a huge thing. Buy gift cards at the restaurant you like because if you don't, it might not exist. I did that a bunch.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them. It was throughout all the roadmaps. We asked ourselves hey, are customers, like their livelihoods are at risk right now? And this is like when no one knew it would actually be a tailwind for e-commerce, right? We didn't know the severity of COVID. Like it could have been a really, really bad pandemic from a death rate perspective. So like no one's betting like, oh, everyone's going to stay home for two years and everyone's going to buy stuff online. Everyone's like, okay, all our customers are going to go to zero unless we help them figure out how to actually survive through this. And so, you know, of course online only merchants or merchants were well established. Online have that infrastructure. There wasn't supply chain issues yet. So like they're good. The focus then turned, of course, to all these, both hybrid brick and mortar online customers and customers that were only brick and mortar. And so we did all those things like, you know, some restaurants and grocery stores on the platform, like how do we help them do exactly that, like buy online.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give an example, like during COVID, this cultural resilience we had to change was so vital because all of a sudden these grandiose ideas and visions we had for 2020 didn't matter. And what mattered was like, oh, shit, retail businesses are going from 100% to zero. It's like 0% revenue overnight. And how do we help a brick and mortar store across the street now do like order online and pick up it in store, right? Like how do we do that? How do we throw away everything? This is what matters now. Let's try to ship three things in the next month that matter. And that's very jarring, I think, unless you have a culture that just understands that could happen any day. And it kind of gets excited by that.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peers, you know, the engineering directors, they're selling it to the VPs, they're selling it to the broad team as well to get momentum behind it and to say like, you know what, this feels right, let's start doing that. But what's really amazing and also difficult about Shopify, though, is like we're pretty good at never falling into sunk cost fallacies, so we'll throw it all away anytime if the world changes, right? And so that Giving teams the agency, giving product folks at certain levels the responsibility to make a bet, and then having the humility to understand that software's hard, the world changes, and that we always have to ask ourselves, is this the most important thing that we can do right now”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those end goals and iterating through ideas good and bad. And so this is actually where Shopify is a really hard place to because we do this because we recognize a couple things. One is like it's important that we set broad direction so everyone can put their energy towards the right place. But we also want a place where we're hiring smart people so that they can figure out what to do. And we also know that in software and in tech and in this world, things change so rapidly. So don't even kid yourself that we're going to plan out everything we're going to have to do for the next year to get there. And so we set this directional kind of outcome and vision-based kind of North Star for where we want to go. Then product directors start to basically shoot their shot and say like, this is how my group can contribute to those things. Here's what we're going to try to commit to in the next quarter, basically. And it's through that almost like back and forth the trust battery thing that I was talking about plays in again. Like they're selling it to their”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do have is like an annual planning cycle basically. We call it like investment plans, and it's for fairly large swaths of the organization. I'm talking like 20% chunks of all of Shopify consolidated under a VP here and there to put forward a vision for what that team's going to accomplish that year, whether that is a directional change or even specific outcomes in some cases. And we spend time aligning with both Toby, the rest of the C-level exec team, even sometimes the board on what that is and what headcount may go with that and whatnot. But that's sort of like the main arc of planning. Like what happens after that is just chaos because chaos, like all the teams underneath and like I said 20, you know, one fifth of Shopify may be moving towards one investment plan that's at this scale like almost 2,500 people, right? So they're all now chaotically moving toward.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I think it depends on the level. So I think as you go towards more the junior PMs and the ICs, there is a much bigger emphasis on balanced decision making between all the crafts, like user experience and engineering, of course. And then it's more when you get to director level or above. That's when there is more emphasis put on where the PM wants to lead because ultimately it becomes like a pure strategic function at that point and that is your only job. Your only job is to say like we need to go there and like my ass is online for us going there. And so that is something I think we matured into. There was obviously lots of tension as we grew of like, hey, we used to collaborate, but now you're seeing like we have to do this thing. And it's like, well, actually the company, the context change, my role changed and we have to do something. And it has to be someone's job to make that choice. So it's a bit of both is the answer.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our ex founders, either through failed startups or through acquisition. And this is really important to us for obvious reasons about just versatility and grit and growth mindset. But then also we are building a platform for other entrepreneurs, whether they're merchants on our platform or developers, to build their own stuff. And so we have a lot of empathy for our customers through that. So the way this is all kind of coalesced is like, you know, the one liner job description we give to PMs as they come in is sort of Your job is to help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way. And it really comes down to like two main concepts there. It's like help teams. So it's like servant leadership. You're not necessarily the CEO of the product or anything. You're not a dictator. Everyone's responsible for product thinking and you're there to help the team get to ultimately the right thing. And that is what you are accountable for.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put the product org on a pedestal as the only people that can have an opinion about the product or should be listened to when we think about what should be built. There's sort of an understanding of Shopify that like everyone at the company from engineers to support to sales, like everyone's responsible for product linking. And it's not just the area for a small group of PMs. And so that's some of the foundations of it. And again, all stems from Toby. I'd say the last one is that this comes from the fact that we have like Canadian roots. And I say that actually in a way that's almost opposite the stereotype when it comes to tech anyway. Like there has been a lot of failed tech companies in Canada and no company that's ever truly been global. And so ambition and a founder mentality has been something that we've architected the culture of the product team around. And so 30 to 40 percent of the PMT.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shopify has an incredibly strong product culture, whether it's uniquely different, I can't know for sure, but I would say I'd start with it's a highly technical company. That's not unique, but it's just something that should be known about Shopify. When I joined all project management was just in GitHub, just commenting on pull requests. And even marketers, in order to augment or upload a blog post, you'd have to commit and deploy it. So there was no breaks given for folks that they didn't want to touch code and stuff like that. I think it was very much, and this all stems from Toby, you know, a very well-renowned developer in the Rails core community. And it all kind of flowed from him. And so because of that, I think everyone in the company had their hands really deep in the product, like regardless of what function you are, which brings me to kind of the second thing I think is really awesome with Shopify when it comes to how the product org works. It's that we don't actually.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think what I learned over the arc of my career is that, especially when it comes to product management specifically, it's a lot of the hard skills that PMs are known for, so like organizational, analytical, good communication, even technical skills. There's sort of table stakes and commodities to be an entry-level PM. And to be clear, it's not easy to be a PM. It's not an entry-level job. And so that is no knock on that. I'm saying to grow beyond that, though, I think like domain expertise can take you a little bit further. Like if you're an amazing payments PM or you have some”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I joined Shopify the week of the IPO, actually, so that's almost seven years ago. And it was like one of the largest companies I ever worked at 500 people even then, at least because I'd been in startups prior. So I thought maybe the story's over. But as I met Toby through my interview process, I realized that that was definitely not true. And it obviously is not true now. So yeah, it's been seven years there. Various PM roles, areas of the product, and then eventually really started to build some domain expertise around platform management and developer ecosystems and kind of grew my career there into that domain, became product director, and then a VP of product. And then in classic Shopify form, I completely threw it all away and started something a little different inside the company 18 months ago. So now I lead what we call product acceleration, which is the team that does all of Shopify's investments, and M&A.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We quit our jobs literally the weekend after we won that. And then fast forward three and a half, four years, we never really made a really big company out of it, but we kind of soft landed, sold the company. And I'd say that's my first foray because my job as a co-founder there was really to work with engineering and design. And it was through that experience that I learned everything about product and I got a lot more technical too. I was able to do a little bit on the front end. And so from that after the acquisition and the integration, I parlayed that into product management career basically. So I joined a growth stage startup in Canada, in Toronto called Fresh Books, which is still around today. They're like a series D company now. And I kind of learned the chops of product management there because the folks there were like X Microsoft 15 years, you know, really technical, process-oriented and framework heavy product management. And I had my just scrappy entrepreneurial experience. So I kind of hardened my PM skills through that over about four years.”
2022-06-27 · Lenny's Podcast · Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source