"Nothing Compares 2 U" - Sinéad O'Connor (by Prince) "Halleujah" - Jeff Buckley (by Leonard Cohen) "Tainted Love" - Soft Cell (by Ed Cobb, originally recorded by Gloria Jones - original is way better) "Hurt" - Johnny Cash (by Nine Inch Nails) "My Way" - Frank Sinatra (originally "Comme d'habitude" by Jacques Revaux)

Shopify is wild: - Their core product team bans KPIs - They optimize for churn - They keep multi-year holdouts for every experiment - The product roadmap is driven not by metrics and goals but by intuition, taste, and a 100-year vision from @tobi - They now power over 10% of all U.S. e-commerce - Last year's GMV of $235B is equivalent to the economy of Finland I sat down with Archie Abrams (@archieabrams), 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—to discuss: 🔸 Why Shopify optimizes for churn 🔸 Why the core product team avoids metrics-based goals 🔸 How they structure their growth team 🔸 Why they keep multi-year experiment holdouts 🔸 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 Listen now 👇 - YouTube: youtu.be/Vlph3dn4jnU - Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3vU… - Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @tryExplo — Embed customer-facing analytics in your product: explo.co/lenny 🏆 @hiDovetail — The customer insights hub for product teams: dvtl.link/3Za7aa0

Probably a host of reasons: - pm/teams make decisions based on a/b testing/data - engineers and designers are not listened or contribute to the product direction - teams are incentivized by “y metric go up” so vision arguments are not listened - hiring those people who say “we launched x, y metric went up 2%” because quality or vision harder to interview - multiple layers of management and hiring massive teams where any vision there might be gets diluted away - product development process is framework driven/overly complex where mental pm energy goes to running it, meetings, not focusing on the product - founders/execs focus on timelines and launch dates, not quality output Essentially great work and quality is hard to measure so organizations give up on it. What replaces is different kind of motions that supposedly do something towards greatness but whole organization mostly just a phoning in/acting product management instead of truly focusing on building great products. At @linear basically trying to do the opposite of all these things :)

tired of taste talk yet? here is another one. I feel like often times designers think of taste as just “having a finer aesthetic preference”. but taste is not a static thing. that’s the taste that money and exposure gets you. at its heart it’s the ability to observe, predict (and create) cultural phenomenons and vibe shifts.

For better or worse, people do judge a book by its cover. Want to design great books with us? We're hiring a designer to craft beautiful covers and help share ideas of progress with the world. Apply via the link below and get to know us at press.stripe.com. 📚 lnkd.in/g2N-Drhc @stripepress