Insight
Lemieux: 'Hire great people and get out of the way' is flawed advice
“Hiring great people and get out of their way is like, is basically an, it is assuming that everyone is magically going to have the same understanding of the world, is magically going to have the same quality bar, is magically going to be aligned on how they do…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: Shopify prioritizes shipping on quality, while Atlassian prioritizes speed
“And I think the non-overlapping I saw the most from the inside was Shopify will ship on quality. Atlassian will ship on speed.”
Insight
Lemieux: Discussing initiatives months in advance kills company execution speed
“Often companies, the way that they lose time and get slow is not just about, like, what to do fast or slow, but they end up talking about too much stuff that won't happen for three or four months.”
Insight
Lemieux: Shipping software reduces risk far more than planning
“We've all been, I think, indoctrinated into planning reduces risk, and I think shipping reduces risk. So as a company, your job is to reduce the most risk possible. And I just really believe shipping does that.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: AI will unbloat tech teams and redistribute engineers to critical sectors
“I think companies are going to unbloat and we're going to distribute programmers, right? Like there's, we've got a global, you know, lack of procreation happening. We're going to have less and less people who can build technology where we need it. Like we need…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: A company building a country OS will become the world's richest
“If someone could come up with a country operating system is probably the next biggest like planet will be the richest company on the planet”
Insight
Lemieux: Choose a career based on strength rather than passion
“You know, like people always say, do something you love. And I'm like, maybe I've heard this. I'm like, do something you're good at, you know? So You know, in some ways my guidance counselor was like, hey, it looks like you're good at it. There's kind of no wr…”
Insight
Lemieux: Polish half your features to perfection and rush the rest
“The good decision is every month pick, you know, half the things that have to be polished, like they're, like the best things on the planet, and half of them don't have to be. You know, and that's where you actually get long-term momentum”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: Shopify measured engineering progress strictly by pull requests and shipped code
“And I literally just look at the PRs and the code that we ship and how, how, You know, how much time we spend on that. And that's literally all the progress. And that's the exact same measure I had at Shopify, by the way.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: Tobi Lütke is actively cutting process overhead at Shopify
“If you look at, I believe Toby at Shopify is implementing this exact same thing. I think we're doing it in parallel universes and we will have beer every summer and compare notes. But I just trying to believe that some of the shift at Toby and Harley have been…”
Insight
Lemieux: Tech leaders must unprogram workers from school-style solo homework habits
“So you've, we've got, like, 21 years indoctrinated in getting a homework assignment, going away, and coming back. And then we're like, we throw you into the workforce, and we're like, by the way, now your job is to cheat as much as you can. I'm gonna give you …”
Insight
Lemieux: VP of Engineering reviews should focus on shipped code
“I think in a, you know, a, you know, a review of, you know, your VP of engineering, you should be looking at the code that that team shipped.”
Opinion
Lemieux: Tech Companies Dogmatically Over-Index on Autonomy Over Alignment
“I think a lot of companies, they feel that any premise of command and control is like, is, is like a religious faux pas now, right? Like if you don't like pray to the autonomy pulpit and church, you're almost burnt at the stake these days, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: AI tools currently write 80% of my code
“And the way it helps me personally is, you know, it writes 80% of my code.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: AI Will Increase Software Jobs by Expanding Developers Into Healthcare
“And you know, what's going to happen is we have a lot more software to write. And that's what people don't realize. Like, is there jobs in software development? Holy shit. Like healthcare agriculture et cetera, like educate, like all these places that need tec…”
Insight
Lemieux: Wait until systems break before adding team headcount
“I always wait till things break a couple of times before I add people.”
Disclosure
Lemieux: As Shopify CTO, I managed the 800-person sales team
“I took over sales at Shopify for a year. To remove. So I had 800 people at Shopify that were in sales and they reported to the CTO for one year because we had a lot of tension and we had to realign.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Lemieux: Small and high-volume merchants share 80% platform requirements at Shopify
“We found some commonalities in the platform regarding these small merchants and large merchants have an 80% overlap.”
Insight
Lemieux: Excessive process and time horizon friction slow software teams down
“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.”
Insight
Lemieux: Product love must take priority over monetization spreadsheets in a startup's first decade
“When you build a company, You have one thing to do is, like, build a product that people can use, and they love it, and they tell their friends about it, right? Like, you can, and you have 10, if you do that for 10 years, and you figure out how to monetize it …”
Insight
Lemieux: Early startups die from indigestion of ideas, not starvation
“I think in your first couple of years, absolutely. And I think whoever said this, I'm not sure where this comes from, but you know, companies are going to die from indigestion before they die of starvation. Which means that we all have way too many ideas in ou…”
Insight
Lemieux: Time-Capping Team Meetings Preserves Execution Speed and Quality
“One of the ways you get speed and quality is by time capping things and then deciding as a team, again, what has to be polished, what doesn't have to be.”
Disclosure
Lemieux: Software team relies on only one weekly meeting
“And we have one, a one hour meeting a week on Who's stuck? That's it. That's literally all we do, and we ship, and you write code, like, you just, you write your product, we ship it, we run builds”
Insight
Lemieux: A CEO's Primary Fear Is Teams Running in Different Directions
“The only thing on the CEO's mind right now is everyone running off in different directions, and not being able to kind of understand what kind of decisions we're making.”
