Collaboration

“I really enjoy being right and then it turns out in the working world, that did not serve me so great. I think the hard part is sublimating your ego a little bit and saying it's more important to get to the outcome than to be right.”

“These silos between designers, product managers, and engineers. Everyone feels that pain of, we have low bandwidth communication, which is language and then text on Slack and Zoom calls. The common language that everyone shares is code. What if the language becomes actually working prototypes and working applications?”

“People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part.”

“At the end of the day, seeing the sales team and the go-to-market team as this really great asset that can help you as a product manager get closer to the customer. I sort of flip that on its head and say sales and the go-to-market teams in general could be your biggest asset to helping you get your job done well.”

“The secret sauce is more of how good of a cross-functional team player are they. I almost view them like a true quarterback. Because marketing technology lives between so many departments, it plays that role of having to call plays and pull on different departments.”

“I joke about The Beatles. You get The Beatles with four people, you don't get The Beatles with eight people and you certainly don't get it with 24 people. The teams get too big and you can't get that what Brian Eno calls scenius. Scenius is the collective idea of genius and I think that's something that's really magical.”

“We don't actually put the product org on a pedestal as the only people that can have an opinion about the product or should be listened to when we think about what should be built. There's sort of an understanding at Shopify that everyone at the company from engineers to support, to sales, everyone's responsible for product thinking.”

“I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas. They're not threatened by the engineering team being full of smart people because they realize that yeah, some of the engineers may have good ideas, but they still don't really know how to do the product job.”