Farhan Thawar: Why Shopify always picks the harder path

When faced with options, Farhan advocates choosing the harder route that maximizes learning and exposure to smart people; even if the outcome fails, you gain skills, relationships, and experience that compound over time.

Farhan deliberately asks ‘stupid’ questions and persists even when people get annoyed, believing the goal is deep comprehension, not image management—and often others secretly share the same questions but are afraid to ask.

Shopify focuses on “more per minute,” using tools like weekly GSD updates, six‑week reviews with leadership, high‑fidelity demos, and strict meeting hygiene to compress more meaningful work into standard workdays instead of glorifying overwork.

Farhan calls pair programming the most underused management tool in engineering: two people (plus increasingly an AI copilot) produce better designs, faster learning, fewer silos, and ultimately more customer value—even if they ‘write less code’.

Shopify runs ‘delete code club’ and hack days focused on removing millions of lines of code, seeing code as liability; they also prefer building platform layers (e.g., NFT-gating infra) that let others build features in an hour rather than shipping narrow solutions quickly.