I'm joining Shopify!
After over 10 years as a Shopify Partner, I’m joining the mothership as a Product Manager. I wanted to breakdown every aspect of why I ended up making this decision.
Shopify is in a transition period right now - a new CTO, the first Chief Design Officer, and LLM assists (read: Tobi’s memo) - as outsiders to the firm, I can only imagine the big moves that are being made internally, and because of this, it feels like the right time to join Shopify. I’ve been a consumer of the APIs for over a decade and seen the platform evolve from a product to the densely connected platform that Shopify has become today.
I didn't want to go in as an Engineer because of my lack of experience with Ruby on Rails - it would take me almost a year to start making meaningful contributions and if I'm being very honest here, I'm an average developer at best. My strength lies more in build products and crafting experiences that makes sense - those of you who have interacted with Yakk and my boilerplates know this very well. Being in Product means I get to work with some really great engineers and have their experience brush off on me so I can grow both as a PM and a Dev.
I also follow as much of the leadership as closely as possible and at some level you could see the shift from just churning out new features to the focus on creating a densely connected network between Merchants, Developers, Influencers and Marketplaces happening on the platform (I wrote about it indepth here). There’s 5 folks at Shopify that made this happen:
- @tobi . The founder’s founder. “I don’t know what people think CEOs are supposed to do - we’ve got product to ship” still echos in my head every now and then, especially as I was building Yakk, but this was also the point where all the stories I’d heard about him started to make sense, where everyone would be around partying or having fun and Tobi would just be there writing code - and that’s also how I saw him, in between all the other engineers hacking away on something.
- @harleyf . A lot of people (including me) would go “Of course he’s hyped about everything it’s his job” and then I saw him at work (same event where I met Tobi) - I wish more people could see Harley sitting down with everyone and talking to them and seeing what’s happening and be genuinely excited over the things that are being built. Like Tobi, his “We actually give a shit about things” echoes in my head every now and then.
- @eytanseidman . I’ve been lucky enough that I get to directly give my feedback on things that are happening and paragraphs about how this one small change is not so fun to work with and how it’s hampering the entire workflow or trying to convince him to drop the TOML files and just use ENVs instead - but all of it made sense with time and the high level of integrity form him is insane to witness.
- Darius. I got to demo how my boilerplates work at Editions dev last year and he just goes “Just apply right now. I want you on my team”. A year later, I ended up exactly where he offered me to be haha!
- @liam_at_shopify . I don’t think I would have done anything without Liam constantly supporting me silently through every open source contribution, post, discussion and encouraging me to put myself out there. I can go on and on about Liam but no combination of words would come close to the contribution he’s had on me as a Partner and Developer.
After the post about applying at Shopify, I’ve got a lot of “Yeah you can chill now” but that’s far from reality - in fact now is the time to push even harder. If I were to completely rely on Tobi’s memo about LLM usage, Shopify grows at least 20% YoY, which means I have to keep up just to be stagnant. That’s equal parts terrifying and fun - I still want to see how far I can push myself and see what I’m actually capable of, where any decision that I am a part of would affect an entire ecosystem of developers and merchants.
Now, my open source and other community contributions aren’t going anywhere. I still get to maintain them in my own time and continue to do so - I’ve already applied for GitHub Sponsorships to be disabled on my account but I genuinely want to thank every single one of you who sponsored my open source work with donations, stars, forks and just sharing the word! The course is no longer on sale but I’ll continue to work on it, in my own time, with what’s publicly available (with minor restrictions). I'm also completely sunsetting all my consulting services and office hours so I can focus more on the work at Shopify.
Sunsetting Yakk was probably the most emotional one, because I wanted to see how far could I push Yakk and have it live through at least one Q4, but sunsetting Yakk was for the better. I’m really thankful to the 300+ merchants I got to work with and on the wait list and for taking a bet at me when I come in with 0 reviews on the App Store.
At the end of the day, I’m really happy with my decision of joining the mothership and amp up my contributions to the Partners and Merchants alike - I can’t think of a better place to put my skills to use that I’ve spent 1/3rd of my life so far at
Here's to making commerce better for everyone 🥂