Jean-Michel Lemieux: Three Product Decisions Every Team Needs to Make | E1129

Shopify will ship on quality. Atlassian 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. And 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.

Jean-Michel, I've heard so many good things from Scott, from Harley. I mean, just brilliant references. What more could you want? But, uh, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's my pleasure to be here, finally.

Uh, finally. Uh, I wanna start with a little bit of context. So I always find, like, finding one's love in life is actually quite rare. Many people don't actually find their love. And so I wanna start on yours. When did you first fall in love with product and tech, and can you take me to that moment?

It's, I think love's a good word. I think, I, I think we, we use that word kind of, we throw it around, but I, I think love is a good word of describing where I'm at, and I'll, I'll tell you why. So I got into computer-y things through, uh, fine arts in high school. So we're going back to 1988. I'm in high school, and I, there's just too many things I like doing. So I picked I'm gonna do fine arts and music and math. And I ignored everything in between. I'd never taken any biology class. I'd never taken any history. I did, literally did fine arts, music, and math. So my days were, you know, drawing and painting, music, band class, and then I did, I did math.

Mm-hmm.

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 MIDI, and I can, I have a keyboard, and I know we're doing a Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables 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 can pull it off." So I used this program called Cubase, like, version 1.1 in 1988 and, um, I guess this is way before AI, but I basically fired the high school band that they didn't have to do anything for the whole musical that year. And I pulled off, um, uh, Les Mis, Phantom of the Opera medley, uh, with my computer and my keyboard, and I, I recorded a, you know, I recorded a bunch of tracks. I did, you know, some stuff, and then I did one, I played one live. And, um, you know, fact, that was like, I was in grade 11 or something. I'm in grade 13, and I'm like, "What am I gonna 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 mean, they don't know any, like, I know no one who does this for a career, like, I'm, I'm just doing this for fun." And, um, she was right. I went into computer science and never looked back. So I think I, I stumbled into it kind of young, but I, I've, 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. This computer's like a, a companion, a co-pilot for creativity, you know? So that's, I, I never got into, like, pro- 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, I fell in love with it.