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)
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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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/shopifys-growth-archie-abrams
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Where to find Archie Abrams:
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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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