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** (0:00)
When you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages or different points in the journey, it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate through that part of the funnel, right? And then the team starts to optimize for that conversion rate as their North Star. But in practice, it's actually almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate. So instead of, I'm trying to convert a bunch of people, I just want more people to get activated. And then once you start thinking that way, you realize actually the best way to get more people to get to a step is just get more people in the door in the first place. That will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may actually give you more people on the outside.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:48)
Today, my guest is Archie Abrams. Archie is VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, where he leads an org of over 600 people across product, design, engineering, data, ops, and growth marketing. Shopify is both an incredibly unique and also an incredibly successful business, and they do things very differently. And as a result, there's a lot that we can learn from how they approach building product and driving growth. Some examples include their priorities and product roadmap are driven by a 100 year vision that comes from Toby, the CEO, and the core product teams don't have metrics or KPI's, they're essentially banned, and instead decisions are made based on taste and intuition and building towards this long term vision. Also, the growth team optimizes for churn, which is unlike any other company I've ever come across. And once you hear why, this will make a lot of sense. Also, they keep long term holdouts for every experiment they run, and they automatically look at the impact these experiments have had on the business, a year later, two years later, and three years later, and then revisit these decisions down the road. And in our conversation, we dig into all of this, plus how Shopify organizes the Growth team, how they run experiments, how the Growth team collaborates with the Product team, how they measure impact. Plus, Archie shares a bunch of very specific and interesting examples of changes that have driven growth for the business, and so much more. This is such a fascinating conversation, and I know this will give you a lot to think about in terms of how you run and organize your own product and Growth teams. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Archie Abrams.
Archie, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Archie Abrams** (2:38)
Thanks, Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:38)
Excited to be here. What I want to do with our time together is to basically do a living archaeology of how Shopify grows and what you, specifically, have learned about growing a company like Shopify into this juggernaut of a business that it's turned into. To give people a little bit of a sense of just how large Shopify has gotten, maybe surprising them about the scale of this company at this point, could you share some stats about the scale of the business at this point?

**Archie Abrams** (3:09)
Yeah, absolutely. Overall, we're about 10% of e-commerce in the United States. Basically, if you're not buying on Amazon or Walmart, you're probably buying on a Shopify-powered store. Behind the scenes, globally, we did about $235 billion in GMV in 2023, which is roughly the size of the economy of Finland. We've got a big economy and big impact happening from Shopify.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:37)
Wow. I think interestingly with Shopify, it's kind of this behind-the-scenes tool. And so I imagine many people have no idea they're using Shopify a lot of the time when they're buying stuff online. And I think some of these numbers kind of creep up on people with just how large a company like Shopify has gotten. 100%.
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