Coates: Bottom-up management destroys product cohesion across multi-product software suites
Glen Coates · Glen Coates: Why Shopify Will Dominate Amazon; How Microsoft Made Smartest Move of 2023 | E986 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 8, 2023 · at 28:48
Glen Coates is VP of Product at Shopify. He critiques the decade-long trend of bottom-up management and explains why multi-product ecosystems require centralized product leadership.
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“The problem with power to the edges and bottoms up decision making Is that the value of a product like Shopify, or the value of, not even a product, like a product suite, like, because Shopify has many products, right? And look at Apple, right? Like Apple is like the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad, the watch, the everything. The value of that suite is to a large extent the way it all works beautifully together, right? And if all the decisions are coming from the edges, the chance that it's all going to work together and like feel like it came from The pen of a single creator just goes, like, goes through the floor, right? And that's what makes using an iPhone and an iPad such an amazing experience, is that it really does feel like it all came from the hand of a single creator, and you need at some point for there to be a single hand on the wheel in order for that to be true.”
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