Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify)

Nov 7, 2024 1h 17m 18 insights Episode Page ↗
Archie Abrams, VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, discusses their unique strategies, including a 100-year vision, optimizing for churn, long-term experiment holdouts, and focusing on absolute metrics. He shares insights on their growth team structure and founder-driven product development.
Actionable Insights

1. Long-Term Experiment Holdouts

Implement long-term holdout experiments (1-3 years) and regularly re-evaluate past “wins” against downstream metrics like total GMV, as short-term lifts often don’t translate to long-term impact or can even be pull-forward effects.

2. Optimize Absolute Numbers, Not Rates

Orient teams to optimize for the absolute number of people reaching a specific funnel stage, rather than conversion rates, to prevent local optimizations that restrict the funnel and ultimately reduce overall output.

3. Prioritize Technical Architecture

Prioritize robust and adaptable technical architecture (“the how”) over quick feature delivery, as strong technical foundations provide long-term strategic optionality and flexibility, even if it means slower initial shipping.

4. Embrace 100-Year Vision

Adopt a “100-year company” mindset, prioritizing long-term success and foundational investments (e.g., enabling entrepreneurship) over short-term revenue gains or chasing existing large enterprise clients.

5. De-emphasize Core Product Metrics

For core product development, consider de-emphasizing short-term metrics and KPIs, instead relying on strong conviction, product sense, and a consistent “taste” bar from leadership to build foundational, forward-facing products. This approach requires a highly opinionated founder or leadership with strong product taste.

6. Lower Barriers, Embrace Churn

Lower barriers to entry and embrace churn if your business model monetizes disproportionately from a few highly successful users (power law distribution), as this allows more people to try and increases the chance of finding those big winners.

7. Scale Monetization with Success

Design your monetization model to scale with user success, allowing a few high-value users to offset churn from many lower-value users, similar to an angel investing portfolio.

8. Reduce Monetary Friction

Explore reducing “monetary friction” (e.g., trial length, incentives, price points) to unlock a class of valuable users who might otherwise give up, as this can causally increase their likelihood of success.

9. Invest in Personalized Onboarding

Invest heavily in collecting relevant information during signup and using it to provide personalized onboarding guidance, as this foundational work significantly impacts long-term user success.

10. Ship Neutral Experiments Judiciously

In an “aim heavy” culture, consider shipping neutral experiments if your intuition strongly suggests they align with long-term product vision or user benefit, rather than strictly adhering to short-term statistical significance.

11. Create Hybrid Customer Journeys

Create hybrid customer journeys that seamlessly integrate self-service and sales channels, allowing users to choose their preferred path without being forced into a siloed experience.

12. Measure Hybrid Journey Incrementality

For hybrid self-service and sales journeys, invest in sophisticated incrementality measurement across all channels and outcomes (including cross-channel effects) to avoid suboptimal investment decisions caused by siloed LTV and attribution models.

13. Avoid “Wizard” Onboarding Flows

Avoid “wizard” style onboarding flows that abstract users from the product. Instead, integrate the simplification and guidance benefits of wizards directly into the core product experience to teach users within the actual interface.

14. Embed Marketing Teams

Consider embedding marketing leads directly within relevant product or sales teams to align them closely with specific goals, especially if founders or key leaders possess strong brand intuition that centralizes the overall brand narrative.

15. Apply Strategic Discounting

Use discounting strategically to signal high value (high list price) while making a product affordable, especially for aspirational products where the act of purchase itself fulfills an emotional “job to be done” (e.g., feeling of progress).

16. Organize Teams by Time Horizons

Structure your organization with different teams operating on distinct time horizons (e.g., 100-year vision for core product, medium-term for merchant services, short-term for growth) to allow for varied strategic focus and decision-making.

17. Embrace Flexible Planning

Adopt the motto “the plan is the plan until it’s not,” committing to your best-laid plans while remaining flexible and ready to adapt when circumstances change.

18. Lead with Empathy and Curiosity

Cultivate a leadership style characterized by empathy, curiosity, and kindness, actively seeking to learn from everyone you interact with.