Archie Abrams

Guest: Archie Abrams - VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify. Archie leads a team of over 600 people across product, design, engineering, data ops, and growth marketing at Shopify, a major player in e-commerce, responsible for about 10% of U.S. e-commerce. Key Takeaways: Long-term Experimentation: Shopify runs long-term holdout experiments to truly understand the impact of changes, often finding that short-term wins don't always translate into long-term success. Focus on Absolute Numbers: Teams are encouraged to focus on absolute numbers of users progressing through the funnel rather than conversion rates, to avoid the trap of optimizing for local metrics at the expense of overall growth. Monetary Friction: Reducing monetary friction, such as trial dynamics and pricing incentives, can unlock valuable user segments by giving them more time to succeed. No KPIs in Core Product: Shopify's core product teams operate without KPIs, focusing instead on building the best product based on taste and intuition, driven by a 100-year vision. Sales and Growth Integration: Shopify has integrated sales into its growth strategy, creating hybrid journeys that combine self-service and sales-assisted paths, requiring new approaches to attribution and incrementality. Topics Covered: Long-term experiments, growth metrics, monetary friction, Shopify's organizational structure, sales integration, product development without KPIs, founder-driven vision.