Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition

(instrumental music) When you have... Teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages or different points in the journey. It gets very seductive to just look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate through that part of the funnel, right? And then the team starts to optimize for that conversion rate as their North star. But in practice, it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate. Instead of, "I'm trying to convert a bunch of people, I just want more people to get activated." And then once you start thinking that way, you realize, actually, the best way to get more people to get to a step is just get more people in the door in the first place. That will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may actually give you more people on the outside.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Archie Abrams. Archie is VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, where he leads an org of over 600 people across product, design, engineering, data, ops, and growth marketing. Shopify is both an incredibly unique and also an incredibly successful business. And they do things very differently. And as a result, there's a lot that we can learn from how they approach building product and driving growth. Some examples include their priorities and product roadmap are driven by 100-year vision that comes from Tobi, the CEO, and the core product teams don't have metrics or KPIs. They're essentially banned. And instead, decisions are made based on taste and intuition and building towards this long term vision. Also the growth team optimizes for churn, which is unlike any other company I've ever come across. And once you hear why, this will make a lot of sense. Also, they keep long term holdouts for every experiment they run, and they automatically look at the impact these experiments have had on the business a year later, two years later, and three years later, and then revisit these decisions down the road. And in our conversation, we dig into all this, plus how Shopify organizes their growth team, how they run experiments, how the growth team collaborates with the product team, how they measure impact, plus Archie shares a bunch of very specific and interesting examples of changes that have driven growth for the business, and so much more. This is such a fascinating conversation, and I know this will give you a lot to think about in terms of how you run and organize your own product and growth teams. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Archie Abrams. (instrumental music) Archie, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.