Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify)
Description
Archie Abrams is the VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, where he leads a 600+ person growth org across product, design, engineering, data, ops, and growth marketing. Shopify powers over 10% of e-commerce in the United States, with $235 billion in GMV in 2023 (roughly the size of Finland’s economy). He previously led Consumer product and growth at Lyft and was at Udemy for 8 years as SVP of Product having joined the company when it was 10 people. In our conversation, we discuss:
• Why Shopify optimizes for churn
• Why the core product team doesn’t use metrics-based goals
• Why they keep multi-year experiment holdouts
• How they structure their growth team
• The benefits of not having a CMO
• Lessons learned about integrating sales into a product-led growth model
• The power of discounting as a growth lever
• Much more
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Brought to you by:
• Explo—Embed customer-facing analytics in your product
• Dovetail—The customer insights hub for product teams
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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/shopifys-growth-archie-abrams
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Where to find Archie Abrams:
• X: https://x.com/archieabrams
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/archie-abrams-b6aa8b6/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00 ) Archie’s background
(02:30 ) Shopify’s impressive growth
(06:17 ) Shopify’s unique approach to churn and retention
(08:43 ) Monetization model and success metrics
(11:08 ) Long-term experimentation and metrics
(23:00 ) Examples of big wins that Archie’s team has shipped
(26:42 ) Monetary friction
(27:14 ) Metrics
(29:47 ) Shopify’s growth team structure
(33:03 ) Goal setting and forecasting
(37:10 ) Examples of long-term results within Shopify
(41:36 ) Shipping neutral experiments
(42:05 ) Building a hundred-year company
(48:04 ) Why Shopify doesn’t use KPIs
(51:30 ) Shopify’s “Get s**t done” framework
(54:30 ) Cross-team collaboration
(58:48 ) The importance of an opinionated founder
(01:01:12 ) Growth and sales integration
(01:06:42 ) Shopify’s marketing structure
(01:08:49 ) Insights on discounting from Udemy
(01:11:09 ) Lightning round
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Referenced:
• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/
• Tobias Lütke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiaslutke
• Gross Merchandise Value: Calculation and Best Practices: https://www.shopify.com/retail/gross-merchandise-value
• Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach
• Glen Coates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glcoates
• Harley Finkelstein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harleyf
• Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/
• Scientific Advertising: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Advertising-Original-Claude-Hopkins/dp/1640954252
• Four-Minute Mile: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Minute-Mile-Roger-Bannister/dp/1493038753/
• The Sopranos on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/the-sopranos
• Suno: https://suno.com/
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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