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Jean-Michel Lemieux

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2024-03-20
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2024-03-20
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  1. “I think it's based on similar principles. What's really interesting is I think Toby and I both understand that there's some sociologic things, not in the way, but that we're conditioned to, right? So just think about what it was like in school for you. You go, you're given an assignment, you take the assignment, and your job's to go away and get an A-plus on the assignment. And not only that, you're not even allowed to talk to people. You can't even talk to people. You can't even get help on that assignment. Like it's crazy. So we've got like 21 years indoctrinated in getting a homework assignment, going away and coming back. And then we're like, we throw you into the workforce. And we're like, by the way, now your job is to cheat as much as you can. I'm going to give you assignment and you could cheat. You better cheat, right? You better be looking at shortcuts, trying to find other ways of doing it and cheating, right? And I think as we're building companies, just getting people in the mode of like, these aren't homework assignments where you get it perfect and you go, wait, you've got to cheat, right? You've got to build prototypes. You got to look at other people. You got to get feedback. You've got to put in the wild and see if it'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

  2. “I believe Toby at Shopify is implementing this exact same thing. I think we're doing it in parallel universes and we will have beer every summer and compare notes. But I strongly believe that some of the shift that Toby and Harley have been making it at Shopify are to get towards this. Now, I'm not saying alignment's not important. You have to be aligned. Like a 1% difference in trajectory between the Earth and the Sun, 1% puts you 1.2 million miles away from the Sun. So people can drift and teams can drift. So the question is, how do you align? There's a million ways of doing that that are very ineffective and some ways that are way more effective at aligning.”

    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

  3. “No, no, it's super easy. It's like we decided where do we want to be in three years? You need a chat about that, what are we about? What are we about? What are we not about? Cool. We realign at every quarter, whatever. Like, cool. And we're like, what are we doing next in the next month? Cool. So I literally, I go into Linear. We write, we have a meeting, we write, what are we doing next month? Cool. And we have a one-hour meeting a week on who's stuck. That's it. That's literally all we do. And we should. And you write, like just, you write your product, we ship it. We run builds, like all the other shit. But you'd be surprised at it makes everyone on my team very uncomfortable. We've all been, I think, indoctrinated into planning reduces risk. And I think shipping reduces risk. So as a company, your job is to reduce the most risk possible. And I just really believe shipping does 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

  4. “You have a lot of people who can't write code in a company, but they're going to see progress as having planned. So they're going to have plans. But the only way to have plans is you have to talk to people writing code because you're going to put a plan together and you go, can we do this? How long is it going to take? So you end up having meetings with people doing the planning to help you do the planning with the people who are doing the building. You see that. So you end up having this bottleneck of way too much planning happening for the actual output of building and you can't plan without the builders. So at some point, I was like, what if we just cut out this planning process has to be completely thrown out? And I bet most companies completely like over plan 100x. I'm not saying you don't plan. I'm saying you should just plan enough. I'm swinging the pendulum personally now because I believe there's a model of progress and shipping things that you can take a lot of cruft out. And I'm in this experiment now of taking as much cruft as I can out and building and time capping. And I'm absolutely loving it. I've never felt as productive. I feel like we're getting.”

    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

  5. “You down. So I call it time horizon friction. Time horizon friction is caused by a lot of process. And that process is you have a lot of people who want to put plans in place and they feel comfort. You talked about how do you get comfort in progress is some people get comfort in planning progress. They go, man, we're friggin' nailing it. Like we've got plans for these 10 things and we've got, I've got a good roadmap, you know, I've got people that are really excited about what we're building next. I was realizing I was like ShockFi's slowing down in these places. And then I do an audit of things that we're like, we've got, you know, we have planning process. We have, we have to write briefs. We've got to get roadmaps aligned. And I was like, holy shit. And you know what happens then is you end up having more meetings about work that you're not doing yet than you are doing the actual work so so i call it time horizon friction because you're planning the future and you're not building the present and think about an organization and i'm sure people listening you've all lived this is”

    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

  6. “Yeah, and as you can tell as we're talking, I'm probably overly maniacal about waste, maybe put it that way. And I've been pulled into the whole, there's a process that's going to make me better. There's a way I should be working that's going to be better that's going to bring something out of me. And a lot of this came out of like some of the last years at Shopify, you know, as I was programming the organization and trying to get the most out of people is we put process in play. Like you put process in place because you got people and some of it's there. But what I realized is at the end of the day, what just really mattered was like a couple of people making some really good decisions and us writing code and getting. It's almost like your architecture is your strategy. So I was like, why don't we spend more time talking about that versus who's doing what and do we have story points? And one really, really good example is I believe that one of the things that slows teams down the most is what I call time horizon friction. See, if you think about slowing down, it's physics, right? Like there's some friction in place that's going to slow down.”

    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

  7. “I just look at code too. How much do we ship? Code talks and bullshit walks, which is, I see where we're shipping. Is it good? You see, we ship this stuff this week. And it's not, are we doing more than last week? We have a consistent hum of we ship this kind of stuff right every week. And it ebbs and flows, but over time, I'm like, if we can keep that cadence up, I'm kind of happy. And I literally just look at the PRs and the code that we ship and how much time we spend on that. That's literally all the progress. And that's the exact same measure I had at Shopify, by the way. It's not different. There's no magic thing. I'm like, I was like, what are we shipping? And then you have to look at there's things that you ship that are different, right? There's some things that are one line of code. There could be some magic in one line of code. So it's not necessarily like number of lines of code, but it's just, you see this velocity happening in things shipping and you just like humming in a company of shipping. When you see that happening, and it's not a hum of meeting, it's not a hum of, we're talking about stuff, but it's like after all that filtering, if you discuss, you align is like, can you keep shipping stuff?”

    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

  8. “Yes, absolutely. So I'd say like for me in my current startup, I was like, I'd love to build a multi-million dollar business with the least amount of people possible. So I was like, how do I do that? There's obviously some technical foundations we have to put in place so that, you know, I'm not woken up at night or I don't have to hire a bunch of people. So I did spend a bit of time getting some of that in place, obviously. And then I'd say the designers we work with, like I've got this designer who was really good. And I think honestly, it's a weekly debate on what we do now. But I think one of the ways you get speed and quality is by time capping things and then deciding as a team, again, what has to be polished, what doesn't have to be. And I think it's thrown my team for a loop a bit, which is I just don't want to talk about that much. That doesn't matter. And no one does that. Everyone's way too polite. Everyone wants to talk about stuff that's going to happen in the future. I'm like.”

    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

  9. “These founders, in is like what's in each bucket, not pick one bucket, like that'd be stupid, but what's in each bucket? How do you know that every month? And how do you readjust that every month?”

    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

  10. “I'm in the middle of building. So I did the shop fight lasting thing hyperscale. And I've done the one to N a lot. After you have product market fit, everything breaks. And how do you put the pieces back together and build a company and an organization to get to 100x that? I haven't done the zero to one in a while. One of the things I've been doing for the last year is zero to one again and just prove I can go back to band class and play my instruments. And I'm living this viscerally right now, which is that debate of like speed versus quality, the good decision is every month pick half the things that have to be polished like the best things on the planet and half of them don't have to be. And that's where you actually get long-term momentum, which is polish the things that you want. You know your customers are going to go, holy shit, I just use this app blah blah and it does XYZ like amazingly. And then the other stuff, like, you know, they're not probably going to tuck their friends a bit, right? So for me, that's the thing of just like every month there's like half I'm doing I'm gonna rush it and in half I'm not the question to you and”

    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

  11. “I think in your first couple of years, absolutely, companies are going to die from indigestion before they die of starvation, which means that we all have way too many ideas in our brain. And our instinct is to give everyone everything. And it's really hard to say no. So you're absolutely true, right? Give people a couple of things that are really, really good and then buy you time to figure out what the next things are.”

    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

  12. “And then the way you monetize that, if it's a long game, maybe the first 10 years you break even, you're making some profit and you've got some levers to play, right? And I think both companies use those levers differently. Both have been extremely successful, but it's really interesting to see them kind of two different playbooks.”

    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

  13. “Let's just get into the comparison to like a lasting to Shopify. I think at lasting was a lot better extracting value, like revenue from that value that you're giving. That's what a company does. It was like, I'm going to give you some value and I'm going to over time extract some revenue so I can keep giving you value over time, right? You have to create a feedback loop there. And the last thing did a better job, I think, monetizing some of the products. Shopify's starting to do it, raised prices for plus recently. And I think it's something we talked about internally. And the other thing, when you're building a company, here's the other thing to realize. When you build a company, you have one thing to do is like build a product that people can use and they love it and they tell their friends about it. If you do that for 10 years and you figure out how to monetize it over time, like that's an okay position to be in, right? Monetize enough to keep going, but you have some flexibility in how you're going to do those levers, which means that if you spend too much time looking at the spreadsheet, you're going to forget about your priority number one, which is you have to get people to love your product and tell their friends about it. And then actually yell to their friends about it, which I think both companies have done have done really well.”

    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

  14. “I think Atlassian was a crazy good business in terms of like, as you said, Scott's really good at numbers. I remember seeing spreadsheets of spreadsheets of here's Lassing's going to look like in 2020 and 2010, really good mechanics of how to create great businesses, right? And Shopify, I think great business. I think the product is really, really good. I think that we didn't extract as much business, right? from it. Flicky could be 10x the revenue, right? If you look at how much value is being provided. So very different companies. Now both are really successful and you could go in the past and go, actually, if you did that thing, there's some magic sauce that made Shopify what it is today that if you would have done some more pricing optimization, maybe wouldn't have turned into it. And the same thing for Atlassian, right? But that's where the Venn diagrams don't overlap as much.”

    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

  15. “Yeah, and I think one thing you're not seeing is there's pairs of people, right? There's Harley and Toby, and then there's Scott and Mike, right? So all these companies have a bunch of really good people who are making decisions. And I think the non-overlapping I saw the most from the inside was Shopify will ship on quality. At last, they'll ship on speed. And I think that's culturally like Atlassian does a lot of stuff. You go to their webpage and there's a lot of products. They've a lot of M&A. There's a lot, right? There's a lot. And I think that was driven culturally. I think the founders are very, they're good at acquiring, turning that into monetization and using their using their pool of customers really well. Both turned into really great companies. At Shopify, we spent a lot more time on doing less things. And from the outside, you might say, well, we did a lot, but less things and we would, especially Toby would stop things based on quality, which I would not see as much as it lasts you. Now, both companies, you know, obviously evolved since then, have done a lot of things, but you can still see that in, yeah.”

    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

  16. “Curious, what do you think? You know both. You've interviewed both. Let's compare notes. Where do you think they don't overlap? Am I allowed to do that? Can I ask you questions?”

    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

  17. “Particularly both invested in building communities around their company, right? Like you don't build a product, you build a movement. Atlassian built a movement around open source 20 years ago around easy software and getting people really excited about it, right? They did things like cash for clunkers. They were going after Joel Spolsky at the time. It just built a movement around like how people work, right? Their vision was empower, you know, everyone working on teams, right? They built a movement around that. Shopify, same thing. What did Shopify do? I think at the time Harley and Toby got in touch with Tim Ferris like, hey, you wrote a book at the four-hour work week. There's a movement around being an entrepreneur. Shopify wasn't about the product. It was about a movement of.”

    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

  18. “That's a good question. So from band class to leading and growing kind of the engineering organs of these two companies that at the time had no idea where they're going to be so massive. And seeing both from the inside, I'd say shopping at lasting are really interesting. If you drew a Venn diagram of both companies, there's an overlap and there's a non-overlap of both. So the overlap is founders playing the long game and good at marketing. And that might be a bit weird coming from an engineering dude. But like founders playing a long game. So making these decisions that, you know, I guess staying alive long enough that you just you'll be around longer. And they're both brilliant in marketing, right? Harley, Mike, and Scott, like they knew the value of getting eyeballs. And as an engineer building things, I was at the time when I met all these folks, was heads down just trying to make things work, loving building companies, building teams together. But I think the value of investing and getting eyeballs was something I learned from both.”

    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

  19. “People always say do something you love, and I'm like, do something you're good at. You know, in some ways, my guidance counselor was like, hey, it looks like you're good at it. There's kind of no wrong path if you keep doing something you're good at. And it turned out I was.”

    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

  20. “didn't have to do anything for the whole musical that year. And I pulled off Le Miz Famer of the Opera Medley with my computer and my keyboard. And I recorded a bunch of tracks. I did some stuff. And then I did one live. I was in grade 11 or something. I'm in grade 13 and I'm like, what am I going to do with my life? And my guidance counselor was like, I think you should go into this computer thing. I'm like, ah, but my parents, like, I know no one who does this for a career. I was just doing this for fun. And she was right. I went into computer science and never looked back. So I think I stumbled into it kind of young, but I've always seen computers as a tool. You know, for me, it was like, hey, it's really cool that I could do this thing. Computer is like a companion, the co-pilot for creativity. You know, I was not like a programmer. I was like a computer's like a tool that can make really cool shit happen, right? And so that's how I fell in love with 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

  21. “I think love's a good word. We use that word kind of, we throw it around, but I think love is a good word to describing where I'm at. And I'll tell you why. So I got into computer-y things through fine arts in high school. So we're going back to 1988. I'm in high school. And there's too many things I like doing. So I picked, I'm going to do fine arts and music and math. And I ignored everything in between. I've never taken any biology class. I've never taken any history. I literally did fine arts, music, and math. So my days were drawing and painting music, band class, and then I did math. And then at one year, I told the band leader, I said, hey, my parents got me a computer. And it turns out that there's this protocol called Medi and I can, I have a keyboard, and I know we're doing a Phantom of the Opera Le Miserab mix. What if I did all the music for it, like myself? You don't need the band. And she was like, that's crazy. And I was like, I was like, I think I could pull it off. So I basically fired the high school band.”

    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

  22. “Shopify will ship on quality, at lasting will ship on speed. You don't build a product, you build a movement. I believe that one of the things that slows teams down the most is what I call time horizon friction. Time horizon friction is caused by a lot of process. And that process is you have a lot of people who want to put plans in place. And they feel comfort. Most companies overplan 100x because”

    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