20Product: Shopify's VP Product on Why the Founder is Always the Head of Product, What Makes Truly Special Product Managers, Why The Majority of Product Managers Need to Change, Why Top-Down Decision-Making in Product is Good & How Shopify Will Be Bigge

**Glen Coates** (0:00)
Best PMs have this feeling about them, where it's like a freight train, that like if you try and stand in front of this thing, you're gonna get fucking flattened. The best PMs have this sense of, I'm building this thing, it's gonna be great. Stand in front of me, you're fucking peril. Let's go.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:14)
I'm gonna put myself out there and say, I have not had this much fun on a 20 product episode since starting this series. Our guest today is incredible. Glen Coates is the VP of product at Shopify, leading the development of Shopify's core commerce platform. He also oversees the core developer platform, and Shopify's part ecosystem, which includes over 10,000 publicly available apps in the Shopify App Store. Originally, he's a CompSci grad. Glen moved from Sydney to San Diego in 2008 Check this out, to run a US distribution and e-commerce for an Australian eco products company. In 2010, he then attended Columbia Business School for one day before quitting to start Handshake, a SaaS B2B e-commerce platform. Glen then joined Shopify in May 2019 when the company acquired Handshake and he's since been in the vice president role since October 2020 But before we dive into the show's day, I need your help. I need your input on the 20VC Miro board as I'm booking new guests that we should feature on the show in 2023 Now this is the only way to make suggestions. Head on over to miro.com forward slash 20VC and leave your suggestions with digital sticky notes or comments. That's miro.com forward slash 20VC and Miro actually sponsored this episode. For those of you that have not used it before, it's this incredible tool that I think is truly game changing. Just ask the one million plus people who sign up for Miro every month. It's a visual collaboration platform packed with the right tools, tech and templates to grow your idea, your product, your vision at scale. Miro acts as a single source of truth across teams. That means you can get buy-in much faster from teams like marketing, engineering, sales, product, basically anyone who needs to have a say to make growth projects grow. And even though it seems like a simple digital whiteboard, it's so much more. Crashing out a sound acquisition strategy, brainstorming Miro, rethinking your sign up flow, using Miro's user research templates, quickly visualize team structures on a Miro board. However you need to grow, Miro can help. We use Miro all the time to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests and leave notes for the rest of the team in our own time. Check it out again at miro.com forward slash 20VC to submit your guest suggestions. And I'm really excited about this next sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel, offering powerful self-serve product analytics. You know, something we talk about a lot on this show is how startups can build the best possible product. Relying on gut feelings is an expensive way to find product market fit. And that's a price many VCs aren't willing to pay. That's why Mixpanel will give you $50,000 in credits when you join their startup program, $50,000 in credits. With Mixpanel, startups find product market fit faster, helping you take your company from MVP to most valuable player. Access your real-time insights with the help of pre-built templates and know that at every stage, Mixpanel is helping you build with confidence and curiosity for free. Apply for the startup program's day to claim your $50,000 in credits at mixpanel.com/startups with an S. If you don't qualify for the program, Mixpanel has pricing plans for teams of every size, from startups to enterprise. Grow your startup like you've always imagined with Mixpanel.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:25)
Three, two, one, zero.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:31)
You have now arrived at your destination.
Glen, I am so excited for this. I've learned so many great things from your love of pad thai to your learning the drums. This is just gonna be a fun show, so thank you so much for joining me, man.

**Glen Coates** (3:44)
Oh yeah, happy to be here, man.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:46)
Thanks for having me. Not at all, but I wanna start with a little bit on you. So how did you make your way into the world of startups first and then come to lead the product to Shopify today?

**Glen Coates** (3:55)
Yeah, I've had a winding and weird career that just looks stupid on paper. I was a CompSci grad. I was a video game developer for three or four years. I ended up in San Diego. Basically one of my high school teachers asked me to move to the States and run like the US warehouse of him and his wife's eco-friendly shopping bag business, which I was like, I want to move to the US. Let's do this. And so I ended up in San Diego in a warehouse with forklift whizzing around me and that kind of stuff. And I was like, I was a video game developer a second ago. What just happened? And as part of that business, which did a lot of wholesale business, I ended up going to a lot of trade shows in New York and being on the floor of the Javits Center. I would be writing orders in these order books for like when people would come to the booth and say, I want to have your bags in my store. And so after doing a bunch of these trade shows, I kept thinking there should be an iPhone app for entering these orders. This writing orders in books thing is like a nightmare. After a while, I just kept thinking someone would build an iPhone app for this and it just kept not happening. After a couple of years of that, I was just, fuck it. I'll download Xcode, I'll learn Objective-C, haven't coded in a couple of years, let's go. And I built a prototype of what eventually became Handshake, which is just literally an iPhone app for entering orders at a trade show. I moved to New York around the same time. And then I basically applied to go to business school, went to business school, went for one day. And then I was like, actually, this is not what I want to be doing. I'd actually rather be coding 12 hours a day. And so I quit business school and then Handshake just happened. And that's where my old friend Mike Elmgreen came on board as my co-founder to run sales and marketing. I think you met Mike and he's probably told you all the trash about me.