Archie Abrams: Why Shopify bans KPIs and optimizes for churn

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

November 7, 2024

Duration

1h 17m

Channel

Lenny's Podcast

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Archie Abrams is the VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, where he leads a 600+ person growth org across product, design, engineering, data, ops, and growth marketing. Shopify powers over 10% of e-commerce in the United States, with $235 billion in GMV in 2023 (roughly the size of Finland’s economy). He previously led Consumer product and growth at Lyft and was at Udemy for 8 years as SVP of Product having joined the company when it was 10 people. In our conversation, we discuss:

• Why Shopify optimizes for churn
• Why the core product team doesn’t use metrics-based goals
• Why they keep multi-year experiment holdouts
• How they structure their growth team
• The benefits of not having a CMO
• Lessons learned about integrating sales into a product-led growth model
• The power of discounting as a growth lever
• Much more

— Brought to you by:

• Explo—Embed customer-facing analytics in your product: https://explo.co/lenny
• Dovetail—The customer insights hub for product teams: https://www.dovetail.com/lenny

Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/shopifys-growth-archie-abrams Where to find Archie Abrams:

• X: https://x.com/archieabrams
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/archie-abrams-b6aa8b6/

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Archie’s background (02:30) Shopify’s impressive growth (06:17) Shopify’s unique approach to churn and retention (08:43) Monetization model and success metrics (11:08) Long-term experimentation and metrics (23:00) Examples of big wins that Archie’s team has shipped (26:42) Monetary friction (27:14) Metrics (29:47) Shopify’s growth team structure (33:03) Goal setting and forecasting (37:10) Examples of long-term results within Shopify (41:36) Shipping neutral experiments (42:05) Building a hundred-year company (48:04) Why Shopify doesn’t use KPIs (51:30) Shopify’s “Get shit done” framework (54:30) Cross-team collaboration (58:48) The importance of an opinionated founder (01:01:12) Growth and sales integration (01:06:42) Shopify’s marketing structure (01:08:49) Insights on discounting from Udemy (01:11:09) Lightning round Referenced:

• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/
• Tobias Lütke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiaslutke
• Gross Merchandise Value: Calculation and Best Practices: https://www.shopify.com/retail/gross-merchandise-value
• Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach
• Glen Coates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glcoates
• Harley Finkelstein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harleyf
• Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/
• Scientific Advertising: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Advertising-Original-Claude-Hopkins/dp/1640954252
• Four-Minute Mile: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Minute-Mile-Roger-Bannister/dp/1493038753/
• The Sopranos on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/the-sopranos
• Suno: https://suno.com/

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Archie Abrams

  guest

• Lenny Rachitsky

  host

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, featuring Archie Abrams and Lenny Rachitsky, Archie Abrams: Why Shopify bans KPIs and optimizes for churn explores shopify’s Growth Playbook: Ban KPIs, Embrace Churn, Trust Intuition Shopify’s VP of Product & Head of Growth, Archie Abrams, explains an unconventional growth philosophy built around a 100‑year vision, power‑law economics, and radical experimentation discipline. Rather than obsess over churn and retention, Shopify optimizes for lowering barriers to entrepreneurship, accepting high failure rates because a small set of power users generate the vast majority of GMV and profit. Core product teams are not driven by KPIs or OKRs and instead prioritize taste, technical architecture, and long‑term merchant value, while the growth org uses metrics but validates impact through long‑term experiment holdouts. The conversation covers team structure, experiment design, incentives, monetary friction, sales and marketing integration, and how to make a “no KPIs” model work without drifting into chaos.

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