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In my first week at Shopify, I had a bunch of meet-and-greet conversations with people around the org and one of them really stuck with me. It was a conversation with a GM for somewhere else in the company, and I asked him, hey, what advice do you have for me in my first year? Here’s what he told me:
“In your first 6 months here, here is your number one job. Familiarize yourself with the dozen senior people at Shopify who have the final call on really important decisions, from Tobi and Harley on down. You need to familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy around business and around how Shopify works. Go consume every written memo and every podcast episode (we have a great internal podcast called Context) they’ve ever done, get inside their heads, learn their perspectives and their preferences, and learn what gets them to say Yes to things.
“Here’s why this is your most important job. In your first six months, you’re gonna be useless anyways. You’re going to be drowning in new information and context and it’ll take you a few months to learn how to swim. But then once you do, you need to become effective. And in order to be effective, you need to know how to get those people to say Yes to things, and how they would think through a decision down to a detailed level. If you can do that, then you can get basically anything you want done. If you can’t do that, then you’re never going to get anything done. Therefore, this is your most important job right now.”
I remember thinking at the time, wow, that sounds like really important advice, I should listen. And I did put in some effort; not nearly enough, in retrospect, but more than zero. Now, six months in, I’m not nearly at a point where I would consider myself “effective” yet - I still have a long way to go in that department. But that advice is paying huge dividends already; not only with my own initiatives but actually more so with helping other groups with theirs.
When you’re in a company full of smart people, like Shopify, it can often be quite tricky to resolve disagreements and impasses with, say, product decisions - because the conflicting opinions all have a lot of merit. So I’ve found it very helpful to be able to bring to the table: “Here is how I think ____ would look at this problem, from their perspective and their philosophy. It’s a pretty different POV from how we’ve been talking about it so far, so hopefully that added perspective helps us get unstuck, since they’re ultimately the person who has to say Yes here.”
Moreover, it’s not like we only care about their opinions because they are decision-makers; this isn't really advice about relationship-building. It's advice about how to think better. Great leaders are right, a lot. They know things. So having their operating philosophy available on-demand, or even a rough approximation of it, can be really useful in moving the ball forward and getting teams aligned around the best possible decision.
Six Lessons From Six Months at Shopify
Alex Danco
At an early stage, a poor country with a surfeit of labour is better served by maximising its crop production until the return on any more labour falls to zero. Put another way, you might as well use the labour you have – even if the return per man hour looks terribly low on paper – because that is the only use you have for your workers. A gardening approach delivers the maximum crop output, as any gardener knows.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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