YouSaid · the spoken record

Jean-Michel Lemieux

lines on the record: 72
first: 2024-03-20
most recent: 2024-03-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It was a pleasure. We waited too long and again sorry for the 20 million directions, but I hope it comes out good. So thanks, Harry.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Okay, let's peek into Shopify's product strategy was exactly that, right? So if you take all the retailers on the planet, right, you organize them maybe as a bit more like a triangle, right? So there's complexity and there's volume. Okay. Actually, if you draw a line and you don't, you just look at complexity and volume, right? What you realize is that high volume and low volume merchant are often low complexity. Oh, holy shit, they've got something in common. They're low complexity. What does low complexity for retail looks like? It's low skew count. Their catalog's not a million things. They've got one website. So a mom and pop.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problems with misalignment of sales is sales bringing you the wrong customers at the wrong time. So if you can realign that and then you're like, well, what are the right customers at the right time? Cool, let's talk about that. And I think that's one of the things that I did for the one year when I was running sales. And Harley was nice enough to hand me the keys for a year and then take them back, but was really realigning on that. And, you know, for us was deciding Shopify is going to be the biggest hype platform on the planet. We want to land all the celebrities. We want to land the biggest retailers that are having pain points. And we kind of listed, you know, and then, you know, we went ahead and built for that. We said, we don't want to land these kind of customers. And we went through and kind of redesigned who we wanted to land, focused the roadmaps on delighting the ones we wanted to land this year.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so you've got two companies. I think there's some companies that are very sales driven where absolutely there's some tension around sales. I think there's a whole hour podcast we can talk about engineering leaders and how to manage that. It's not removed the tension, but how do you use attention for good and not for bad, right? Because that's useful. And you can talk to Harley about this, but one of the things he did, well, he encouraged is I took over sales at Shopify for a year to remove. So I had 800 people at Shopify that were in sales and they reported to the CTO for one year because we had a lot of tension and we had to realign. We had to decide on what customers were saying yes to and no based on not just what we want money wise but what we want product market fit wise and it got me really involved in helping with that tension actually accelerating it right and one of the things I did is like I love sales which is which is like bring us the right customers at the right time and I think one of the biggest”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the function that has the most tension is the design, product, and engineering, like that triad, right? That tension there.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started on the support team at Shopify, and that was the best thing that I've ever done. And it's the only time I did it, I spent one month and I said, if I can't take customer phone calls for the product that I'm leading and I'm building, I should be fired. So I thought that was one of the best things I've ever did. I learned so much about the product. I learned about the team. I learned about customers. I turned out to be an expert user of Shopify and I would recommend that everyone starting a new jobs would literally start on the phones.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They hire too quickly as a result. They don't know what the capacity of their team actually is on paper. So I always wait till things break a couple of times before I add people.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think CEOs underestimate go to market a lot. I think you talked about that. Like, how are they going to acquire customers and are they going to be able to create a movement around what they're building? And I see CEOs think they can do it, but don't realize the grind it's going to take over year over year. And I think they see the outcome of companies like Atlassinium Shopify who've been doing it for 15 to 20 years and assume it just happens, but it's daily, daily grind to get people to care about what you care about. There's a saying, which I said, no one cares about what you're building. Like literally, no one gives a shit about it as much as you do. And how do you get people to give a shit about it?”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think they're marketing it as a business tool. So pricing's kind of, you know, it's not a $4.99 pricing. It's going to be the data layer for your company if you're not willing to pay $49 a month to see everything that's happening in your company. You're probably not the right tool. So I think they're positioning themselves as a pro tool, right? Again, is there a pro tool market? I think there's some really good pro tools. You talk about Adobe, right? Some pro tools that have been successful.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're right, like customer acquisition is hard. I think that's something I learned from Shopify and Atlassian is it's hard. So my zero to one, the first thing I did is my co-founders, our YouTube celebrities. So I'm like, okay, I've got that. I've got that part nailed. So I can go to market quickly.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why you're a much better investor than I am. I'm a happy customer and I see how it changed my life, but I have no idea if this is a business or not.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building a hard product, and this is, you know, I think to your question, Harry, right, about there's some startups who are solving some really hard problems where it might take 50 million bucks to get a 10 out, right? And how do we build a VC culture where that's”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How you use something completely. So get equals is basically taking the SQLers and the XLs and giving them a shared data warehouse we think work together. Zero investment. I'm not getting paid for this. I'm just, I just love using new things. We're like, holy shit, this changes how I work.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife just pulls she's my counsellor and my cheerleader. Honestly, like, yeah, she, you know, some people don't bring their work to their spouses, but I do a lot and she's my life partner. And honestly, she's my biggest cheerleader. The fun part about Building 0 to 12 is it did let me try out a lot of cool companies new products now that, you know, like you read about them on Twitter and you see, but now I'm like actually like, hey, let me use, you think that your new thing is really cool? Let me use it. So I've met a lot of really good people by just, I'm going to use your product and I'm going to give you some feedback. And it's been fun. Like I'll give you one example. One of the products that I'm really pumped about now is called equals.com. So get equals.com. They're doing something that's super subtle, but actually the more you use it, the more you see the value in it. It's kind of like I'd never invest in this if I didn't use it day in, day out. And because I think there's some innovation that comes out that's not deep tech, but that's changing.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that a lot of it's the same. I think the hardest part was it is a bit more lonely. There's two of us and we're grinding and grinding and there's a lot of friends at Shopify and people I could shoot the shit with and people who are in the same bucket. And I felt it was a bit lonely and it was a year grind that if you see some of my tweets, I had some pretty low lows and pretty high highs and I'd forgot huge respect for that first year or so when you're just trying to pull the pieces together. You're trying to figure out what to build, what not to build.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there you go. Okay, so you know all about the pace bunny. There's it's really hard to have a pace bunny for a company and a team, right? I'm a big fan of pace bunning myself. I'm like, as a leader or a company, you should always be looking for your pace bunnies. So looking at what other people are shipping, looking at velocity of other teams. And a lot of the people that I talk to where I'm like, I'm building my hiring pipeline or I'm learning something. I'm always going outside to like, you know, CTO at Spotify. I'm like, hey, can you talk about how you do infrared on this? And do you talk about your last couple of incidents? What were they? You know, like always trying to like pace myself. I'm like, and often, you know, I'd be really hard on myself. I'd go, oh, actually, we're all doing this shitty thing. And then sometimes I'd be embarrassed going, oh my God, we can be so much better. So I think a really good tool for, I think leaders is build a pace bunny process of some sort where you can talk to enough people where you build kind of an internal model of what great looks like. And then you bring that to your team. And then you can obviously making sure you're surrounded by people who care about that.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, that is such an interesting question. How does every team get pulled down and not do to the best of their ability? I think one of the hard things about teams and building companies is it's really hard to pace yourself. You know, it's kind of like you're running a marathon, you know, like, I don't know if you've done any half marathons. Like, there's always a pace bunny.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they are. Obviously, it's hard to build a, it's like almost a platform company. You're building a foundational layer of the thing, right? The internet hospitals, et cetera. It's actually a lot harder. And you've got two exits, right? Someone's going to buy you because you're going to build a layer and someone else wants it, or it's going to take you 20 years before you scale. But for me, I see it de-risk because I've been on the buying side of being in a bigger company going, that small company really, they push that platform in a cooler little direction. Let's acquire them. So I see some, there's always two exits for platform companies that I think is useful to think about, right? As you start looking at risks, and it's harder, but I think that's hard tech, we have to get better at doing harder things.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's not. It's like, but how do you think about that, right? Like we might be at a point where we need more infrastructure than ever. We've been building startups and things here and there, but how do we do the rest, right? How do I electrify our roads? How do we do better intake system in hospitals, data sharing? I see a lot of opportunity there.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, and this is where I think you and I spend time in different places. So I'm more, I look at things more as opportunities to build new things, and I've never seen as many, right? And I always get frustrated. I go to every government's website. Like, actually, you know what the coolest thing to build right now, and this is where maybe from a VC, we might be at a point where we're actually building human infrastructure a lot more now, right? Which maybe the VC model might be busted. But you know what I need is a company. I need a country operating system. I bet you, like if someone could come up with a country operating system, it's probably the next biggest multi-planet, we'll be the richest company on the planet is a company operating system, which is how do you run a country right now? Like, how do you run a country like website taxes, like all that stuff? Like we're being, it's crazy how much crap software and technology we have out there. So for me, that's opportunity. You're seeing how do we make money out of it? I kind of don't care. I just think I want to make everything we touch better, right? Better customer experience, better product experience. So if I look at an opportunity.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if you go back in the past, is there a time where there hasn't been the five incumbents that scared the crap out of you?”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think honestly, I love it. I think companies are going to unbloat and we're going to distribute programmers. We've got a global lack of procreation happening. We're going to have less and less people who can build technology where we need it. Like we need more efficiencies in agriculture and healthcare, in education, in renewable energy. I think we're going to distribute these programmers that we're making tweets boost on Twitter and Facebook. And we're going to distribute them more because we are going to need less. But I tell you, I think the pie is going to grow in terms of the kinds of problems we can throw technologists to. And I think that's kind of what's going to happen.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I'm not sure. It's kind of like music, right? In the music studio, it would give me my tempo. I can do a lot of tweaking with sounds. I can invent new sounds. But I've got the tune in my head. That's kind of where we're going to be at with computers.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Etc. Like educate like all these places that need technology have been completely under invested. We've got a distributor programmers more than we have.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely love where we're at with AI encoding because it brings me back to 1988 when I told our band leader that we didn't need the band to do a musical. So I've seen this playbook happen 30 some years ago where I fired the band to do some music. I've seen the power of like the computers. It's your co-pilot for doing things, right? And right now I literally feel giddy and excited about programming because I've got a co-pilot in my IDE. And I think it'd be crazy not to use those tools, right? Like there's no musician now does not have a computer in the music studio. I think we're just catching up now with a bunch of other trades where it's going to help us. And the way it helps me personally is, you know, it writes 80% of my code. It doesn't write my architecture, but the programming AI tools now let me work on the hard stuff, which is phenomenal. And that's going to keep going. And you know what's going to happen is we have a lot more software to write. And that's what people don't realize. Like, is there jobs in software development? Holy shit. Like healthcare, agro.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two years, three years, four years, you'll realize that when it's time, you're just going to know so many people that you want to work with. That one is like, it's going to be super amazing. And then you can start to figure out when you have time, you can look at your Rolodex and you go, cool, let me go back to talk to those three people and figure out where they're at. And so you end up basically having an ongoing continuous networking of cool people that you want to learn from that you can hire from. And then you buy yourself some time internally by just realizing, let's just not negotiate against myself and not be rushed. And for me, those two things have been have been magical.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On what we're here to do. That's a buying time is important. Now, the flip side of hey, we've got all these companies, and I'm sure as VCs and investors were like, you have to hire great talent, absolutely. So the other thing that I thought was really important was like, if I did not talk to a candidate every week, and I don't even call him candidate, if I did not talk to someone that I'd love to work with every week as part of like my ongoing networking, I was not doing my job, right? So I had this buzz flow of like, let's just talk to interesting people all the time. Like, I'd ping, you know, like CTO of Microsoft, like, hey, Kevin Scott, like, I'd love to talk to you about some things that I'm, you know, like, cool, let's have a chat or I talk to some, I see some really good blog posts. I talk to people, right? So I think as a leader, like there's no hiring process where you just start it and stop it. It's always, always going. So I think a lot of the CEOs that I work with in some of the smaller companies, I'm just always asking them, like, have you talked to one person a week that at some point you want to work with? And then what happens if you do that one year?”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right answer is buy yourself some time. One of the favorite books that I've read about leadership is, I think it's called How to Negotiate Your Life Depends on It. In the first chapter, I tell my kids about this because it taught me so much of just, you know, someone has your kid as a hostage. They want a million bucks and you're on the phone with them. And the first thing you do is you've got a monkey on your back because the hostage negotiator says, I need a million bucks tomorrow. And you're like, you have all these things you can say. And the thing you should do is just buy yourself some time. So you throw the question back and you go, how do I get a million bucks in a day? Like that's a lot. And in the Huston negotiator has to think about that. They're like, oh, yeah, that's a lot. Okay, I give you a week, right? So that's, I just remember that's the first example, which is buy yourself some time all the time, right? So how do you buy yourself some time in a company as a manager, as an exec? I'm like, take some monkeys off your back and get some people involved. Like, you know, like for me getting people in a room and going, hey, that VP's not here anymore. Cool, but we still have customers. Let's keep going is buying some time and get people. Let's get refocused on.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super pumped about it. I just brought it back to like here for again, right? You guys are all adults, right? You can drink, you can vote, you have kids, all that shit. Like, what are we shipping together? And I always bring it back to customers. Like, what are our customers need from us right now? It did not change. Yesterday, that person was there. Now they're not there. Nothing's changed but what we have to ship. How can I help do that? Right. And they'll go, oh, well, maybe we should do this and that. I was like, cool. Yes. No, let's do some stuff. Sounds good. And then I would also, I go, listen, let's get ready that we might not have someone in here for six months. So I took that stress off me. I was like, I'll take some of my time a bit. The second thing that happened is everyone just steps up. They get jazzed about what we're doing. Right. They're here. Like they're still getting jazzed about doing this and they get jazzed about just, I see their face light up when we start talking about what they're shipping and what they're working on. And I think that connects me with them, gives me a bit of time. And then I think I make higher better, at least personally, I make better hiring decisions when I get a bit of time to get to know people better.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I skip. I don't do my three steps properly all the time. I get rushed, right? And for me, to get to know someone, it takes a while. When I talk about the snowboard test, like it's not one chat, it's a couple. And then I like, I do really want to dig that. I'll skip it. And I'll like, oh, shit, I saw that. So what I do to not rush hiring though is when someone leaves, I try to take the monkey off my back. And I always felt a huge amount of responsibility that when someone left on my team, especially a manager, that was like, I told their team, I've got it, don't worry, I'll hire someone new. You know, they were always like, there's always a bit of unknowns and people don't like that. And at some point, either it's because I got older, I didn't give a shit, or I just was in so much pain that I remember sitting a team in a room once. And their manager had left their VP, whatever. And I was like, you guys are all adults. You all are doing great work. Keep it up. What can I do to help? I have no idea if Fritz going to take me one week or six months to hire replacement, but what are we shipping in the next six months that I can help with? Like everyone got.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've done it so often. Like for me, it's always when I'm rushed. It's always when I'm rushed. I tell you what, you're rushed a lot when companies are going gangbusters, right? Or you've got pain. So one of the things I've tried to do to remove the rush.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're in that order at the top one of the snowboard disc. Like, I don't know how many times I've done it. Like, you know, I'm on that interview panel. I'm like, my feedback is I don't think they want to do this job. They maybe want the money or the prestige, but I.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say generally not. I think those three-step process for questioning is really about getting to know that human. You're putting humans on a growth trajectory of things and matching that with what your company is. Now, there are some, you know, you're building a logistics company. Like it'd be good to someone who's been in a warehouse before. Like there is some advantage of doing that. But I'd say there's a lot of people you can just throw into the deep end into anything and they're going to learn it, right? I want people who can grow quickly and people who can understand that problems are multi-layered and see that and fix it. I think that's more important.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to know if someone's got an internal quality bar. Again, I want to know what they would put on their life's trophy of what they're proud of, you know. And it both gives me an idea of their level of difficulty, you know, because you've got this job and you're like, I think it's a difficulty 9.5, and then they give you, oh, the hardest thing I did was X. I'm like, ooh, that's a point two. I was like, okay, well, I think they can stretch, right? Like, are they going to be able to stretch that? That's cool. And then that leaves you down a lot of things of going, well, why do you think it was hard? Have you seen other people who are doing this? I just want to get to know someone about what they built. Like, there's so many twists and turns around just asking someone what they've built and how proud they are about it. So that's kind of the three questions. And then for someone senior, I'll have them have lunch with other folks. I think it's important that like, can they get other people to?”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so step three then is going to be obviously talking about okay, well, here's kind of what the job is. I'd like to understand how they'd approach that, what they've done in the past. And I love this one question, which is, what's the hardest thing you've built before?”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No right or wrong answer here. It's just discovering what someone like, do you even like the conversation? Is it fun? I hope after talking to someone about the thing that they really love, that you come away with that, come away out of that chat, super energized and maybe learn one or two things, like that's great. I want to work with people like that, right? So that's step two for me is that kind of deep dive understanding depth”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so step one is you kind of know what their instincts are, what they really like to do. Step two is I want to know how are you going to do X? So then show me how you've done X in the past. So there I'm basically I want them to go into teacher mode to me, which is cool. You want to do X? Can you entertain me and teach me something about X for the next hour? You know, so I'll just geek out for an hour, like talk about X. Like, oh, I'd love to, you know, build a system that could do this. And then I'm like, cool. Like, how would you start? And have you done this before? What do you do? Like, then I'm trying to figure out layers. Because I think great skills for any human is a deep appreciation of all the layers that come into problem solving, right? So like if someone wants to be a great, like, I'd love to build a team and I'm like, cool. Like, do you know psychology? If you're ready to book on human motivation, like, how do you do that? I want to understand someone's playbook in terms of what depth they have in that area. I gave them the snowboard test. They told me they like it. Cool. Like, how much do you really like that? And I want to know someone's depth. And again, there's”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done a bit of research. I've got so many jobs open. You could do anything here. What's your dream job at Lassian at Shopify? What is it? Talk to me about why that is for 10 minutes, right? So that question for me is like the ultimate snowboard test. I want to know what people care about the most like viscerally care about because that's when you're not talking together, when you're not with them, that's exactly what they're going to do. That's step one, and you get to know. And often I'm hiring for X and I'm like, oh shit, their instincts are always on Y. And then you have a decision. You're like, well, can they do X and you need Y or just like you'll see that? And typically, for example, I'll see instincts on like, I really care about the culture. And cool, I really care about the process. I really care about the people. I really care about the tech. I really want to do this. And so that first alignment that you have with whoever you're interviewing, for me, that snowboard test is great. It's super opened. But it works really well. Like you get to know kind of viscally what people want to work on. So that's step one.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man hirings really hard. Three things I think are important. The first thing is I call it the snowboard test, which is premise around the snowboard test is I can't get another human to do something they don't really naturally want to do, right? So I'm like just generally, like with my kids and my dog and cat, like if they don't want to do something, like it's not going to happen. So the snowboard test is the way that you find out if someone is a left, is goofy or not goofy on a snowboard, right? So goofy, depending on what foot you put forward. So the snowboard test is you push someone from behind without them noticing and you look at what foot they put forward. That's their natural instinct, right? So I'm always thinking about it in an interview process. I'm like, how do I give you a snowboard test where it's completely unbiased, but I learn the most about what drives you. So one question for that would be, I was like, listen, I'm interviewing, you know, some exec role or something or someone senior. And I'm like, listen, you know, their question would be, tell me about the job. I'm like, listen, let's not get into that right away. I'm like, you kind of know what we do as a company.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to be a bit more natural than that Companies where there's a lot going on, there's a lot of micro decisions to be made that make a difference. Like sometimes like we're going to put the code there versus there sounds like I just trust you versus that's a route decision because that's going to lead on to a lot of other things. There's no bad reason in getting a couple of points of feedback. So that Susan Scott book and at framework I think is a great way to sit down your team going, hey, there's three types of decisions we're going to be making. These ones I care a lot about, these ones I don't versus I don't care about them all, which is I think is going to be a train wreck.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. I think that the world is so complex. Why would I build a company where I can't use everyone's brain is always the thing I'm thinking about, right? So it's like for me, I'm like, I have to tap into my boss's brain in the most effective way possible because that'd be stupid to not tap into everyone's brain. So for me, I see it less as bothering, right? and more as I need to tap someone's brain”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm like, they don't have to respond to me. I'm just doing these microalignments of like, hey, I saw this thing. What do you think? Or hey, do you see this demo? That's cool. Or like, hey, I need a hand with this. So I'm like, I'm such a fan of like these micro alignments that you've got to build into your habits. And I feel that if you...”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did ABC. What do you think? Bam. Okay, cool. That's cool. Let's align on decisions. Let's align on what did you see and what do I think? Like, like that, you can do these microalignments all the time that are really amazing, you know, to the point where we would hire new executives at Shopfire at Lassian. And one of the questions I'd ask after, you know, this new CFO or the new CMO had been onboarded for three months, I'd go, hey, how often do you talk to our CEO? And they'd go, well, we have our one-on-ones every week. I'm like, oh, wow, that's not a lot. And they'd be like, what do you mean? It's a lot. I was like, well, I do at least one slack a day. And they're like, what do you mean? Like, I don't want to bottle them. What do you mean, you mean bother the CEO? Like, I was like, let me tell you something. The only thing on the CEO's mind right now is everyone running off in different directions and not be able to kind of understand what kind of decisions we're making. So I'm like, I share a decision every day with the CEO by Slack or by email, like the penning.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, hey, I'd say that differently. Why? Oh, that's super interesting. We got to know each other in this super fun way of just shipping stuff together. Instead of talking about it, I was like, can you write that thing? Oh, I hadn't thought about doing that. That's really smart. That's cool. I learned something from Farhan. And then the flip side, he's like, oh, Jabach, I didn't see things that way, right? So we got into this like pairing mode of really getting to know each other. And then by year two and three, I'm like, Farhan, what do you want to work? Like, we kind of know each other at that point, right? But that's very different onboarding and very different philosophy than I think a lot of companies, they feel that any premise of command and control is like, is like a religious faux pas now, right? Like if you don't pray to the autonomy pulpit and church, you're almost burnt at the stake these days, right? Like, what do you mean autonomy? Everyone wants autonomy. I swing the pendulum. I think that you've got to have a lot of high alignment. And you don't do alignment by meetings necessarily. Like alignment's not this. We have to talk all the time. Alignment is like sending your boss a slack mess.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ship that I'd like you to lead. And I'd like you during that time, I'd like you to find three other things that we should do that are really important. And then what's really cool is we're like, I'm not going, here's exactly all the things you're going to do for the next year. I'm helping the kind of the onboarding. I'm like, let's get aligned on how you ship things. So I go, for example, like really great guy. His name's Farhan. I think he runs engineering at Shopify now. I hired Farhan. He's almost too smart. He knows he's looking at everything and I'm like, dude, Farhan, I know you have all these ideas. Here's three things we're going to do. We have to become, we want to become the best company for React Native on the planet. We're making a bet on React Native. And I need you to publish a blog post and do some research on what we're doing internally in React Native. I'd love you to lead the mobile team to get us reoriented around React Native and come up with, we're redoing POS, blah, blah, blah. Cool. Those three things. And then cool. I'm like, can I review your blog post? And then we probably went back and forth on it five, six times together. And I was like, cool.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People and they let them run. And my thesis here is why it's absolutely terrible is and why I'm very strongly saying that is because I think people believe it's really good. And the second thing is the only way you get you get that level of autonomy is when you actually align a lot of things together. So I'll give you a really concrete example. When I would onboard new VPs that would work for me, I would very clearly say, and this is, I'm not smart, I just, I learnt this over many, many years, is I would go, listen, we're going to spend a lot of time together. We're going to spend time together like we were pair programming, like we used to do when we were programming all day. We're going to pair program on leadership. And the reason we're going to pair program is it is as complex as programming. Like there's typos, there's bugs. It's hard. And the only way we can get to know each other is we're going to have to pair program on leadership. And the way we do that is there's a couple of things that I've noticed in the org that I really want you to ship. There's three things in the next six months that, listen, I'm going to make it easy. You don't have to find these. There's three things we have to.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The context here is everyone's heard of that phrase. It must be written in a bazillion Harvard management books, right? Like Harvard people and get it other way. You know, like, and I believed it. I was like, holy shit, like, that makes so much sense, right? Because everyone loves autonomy. Just give people autonomy. And when I realized building companies is if you're trying to get a bunch of people together and have a shared understanding of what great looks like, it's messy. Like there's no way you do that by letting people go in their own direction, right? Like the Steve Jobs analogy, there's a rock tumbler that you're going to be in together to figure out how you're going to polish things, how you get a shared alignment. So for me, hiring great people get out of their way is like assuming that everyone is magically going to have the same understanding of the world is magically going to have the same quality bar is magically going to be aligned on how they do things like is impossible to happen, right? So it's not only do I think it's a bad, I've seen the biggest train wrecks in companies happen because bosses do that or VPs or COs they hire.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't reward yourself by what process you use, but you reward yourself by a shared understanding of what great looks like and building towards that. I think that's how you get better.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's easier. The only thing we should judge ourselves by is that output that people are going to see, right? Like our customers never see the sausage factory of how many meetings we have and what process we use. They're only going to see the output. So let's evaluate ourselves on how good we see the output. And when I do performance review for executives and managers that work for me, like the first question I ask is, cool, what did your team ship? Can you just rank for me what was good versus what was great? I want their opinion. That's a really good way. Like I need everyone in the company to like understand what we're shipping. How do we build a shared understanding of what grade is and what good is? I want to see an organization where we have the most amount of people possible asking themselves that question. You need everyone in the company who has that internal barometer of like looking at things that we're shipping and going like how would I know if that was great? How would I know if that email I sent to the customer was great? Like you should know that, right? So when you're writing it and you should be building it and getting better all the time. And I think if you build an organization where”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't break right away. There's like so many things that we've got to do when we actually build things in the real world and real companies that we've got to unprogram from all these people who are in the school doing homework assignments and trying to get an A and not cheating. So, you know, that's something that we've got to really almost beat out of people and our education system to get people to actually build things, especially like, you know, technically and engineering and product of just like that rhythm of building things, I think is different. And that's why I think swinging the pendulum here is really interesting and just get kids to like, let's write the code. Let's build it. How do you know it's going to work? And I think we're going to get velocity.”
2024-03-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Why Process is Killing Your Product Team and How to Remove it | Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | Why the Best Companies Build Movements and Lessons from Shopify and Atlassian on How to Do It Right with Jean-Michel Lemieux · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source