Archie Abrams, VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, describes the company's internal review cadence and how leadership examines technical architecture.
“Every six weeks, we, all the kind of R and D group leads, we get together and we sit with Toby and each other and review every single project across the company every six weeks. Every single R and D, pull up the dashboard and look at it.”
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More from Archie Abrams
Disclosure
Shopify Has Banned Traditional KPIs and OKRs
“We rant against KPIs are basically banned as a, and OKRs are banned and all that.”
Archie AbramsNov 7, 2024▶ 48:32Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
Insight
Long-Term Growth Experiment Results Frequently Diverge From Initial Wins
“Look at some of the experiments that you thought were your biggest winners. Look at the downstream metrics for a year, two years on that experiment, and I'll bet you'd be surprised how many times the metric is different than what you thought it would be after …”
Archie AbramsNov 7, 2024▶ 14:17Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
“If you think about in a business case, if I give you A little less, a little monetary boost and reduce that monetary friction. I can actually causally change your ability to become successful. Cause I've given you a little bit more time to try that idea a litt…”
Archie AbramsNov 7, 2024▶ 17:04Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
AssertionNot checkable as stated
30% to 40% of Short-Term Experiment Wins Have Zero Long-Term Impact
“Yeah, it's right. It's in the 30 to 40% range.”
Archie AbramsNov 7, 2024▶ 17:50Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
Insight
Growth Teams Should Optimize for Absolute Volume Over Conversion Rates
“Orienting every team to think about the total number of people, not the rate, but the total number of people Who got to the end of their kind of part of the journey is a very powerful way to incentivize people to do the right thing in terms of getting people s…”
Archie AbramsNov 7, 2024▶ 25:50Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
Insight
Reducing Top-of-Funnel Friction Drops CAC Faster Than It Hurts LTV
“And a lot of teams get very nervous. Their retention rate went down. Their LTV went down. Oh my goodness. This is going to affect our ability to pay. No, your CAC also went down by probably more. And so now you have the ability to likely spend more. And you ha…”
Archie AbramsNov 7, 2024▶ 29:12Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
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