Brandon Chu on Product at Shopify

Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Brandon Chu Source URL: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/brandon-chu/

Key ideas

Writing as career accelerator: writing externally is how Brandon built trust internally at Shopify — new PM hires already knew how he thought before day one; a post shared by a senior Facebook exec shifted his standing with Shopify’s CPO overnight. He puts 40 hours into a post. Writing crystallises mental models at the exact moment of figuring them out — not after.
Decision prioritisation: the most important thing when facing any decision is determining how important that decision is. Spend all your time on the critical few (irreversible, high user impact). For all others, go with gut or delegate — never be the bottleneck.
Shopify’s product culture: everyone owns product thinking, not just PMs. PM job: “help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way.” At junior/IC level, balanced decision-making between PM/UX/engineering; at director+, the PM makes the directional bet and is accountable.
Platform PM vs. product PM: cycles are 5–10× longer; you design a canvas for developers, not an end user experience. Must establish platform principles (stack-rank of constituents) before making any technical or design decisions. Not a one-way door — oscillating between both builds a complete picture.
Remote and bursts: Shopify went permanently remote during COVID. Replaced office rhythm with “bursts” — high-intensity, fully-expensed team gatherings triggered by a one-click internal app. In-person still matters for creative velocity and team cohesion; remove all friction from making it happen.

Shopify product culture

Three defining characteristics:

Highly technical. Originally all project management in GitHub; even marketers deployed via code commits. This comes from founder Tobi Lütke’s deep engineering roots (Rails Core community).
Product thinking is everyone’s job. The PM team is not on a pedestal as the only product voice. Engineers, support, and sales all have product responsibility. The PM job description: “help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way” — servant leadership, not product dictator.
Founder mentality. 30–40% of PM team are ex-founders (failed startups or acquisitions). This creates empathy for Shopify’s merchant customers (also entrepreneurs) and a high tolerance for ambiguity and pivots. “Soccer is hard. The world changes.”

Never sunk-cost: Shopify will abandon a three-to-six-month initiative mid-stream if the world shifts. COVID example: abandoned annual roadmaps to ship gift cards, buy-online-pick-up-in-store, and three other survival features in a month. War-time rhythm lasted most of 2020.

Decision-making framework

Brandon’s most-shared Medium post distills a two-step decision framework:

Assess importance: is the decision reversible or not? Does it affect many users materially? The most critical decisions are vastly more important than the other 98%.
Allocate time accordingly: spend all available time on the critical few decisions. For everything else, go with gut or delegate immediately — never be a bottleneck. Team velocity matters.

Over time, battle scars calibrate the bar: things that seemed career-ending often weren’t; you raise the threshold for what’s actually dire.

Writing as a career tool

Brandon stopped writing in 2018 but attributes his career trajectory partly to 40-hour Medium posts written during his Shopify growth years.

Why it works:

Writing crystallises mental models at the exact moment of figuring them out — it’s thinking-in-progress, not wisdom-in-retrospect.
“I don’t know what I think until I’ve written it down” (Hemingway).
Releases ideas from working memory — clears space to build on top.

Career effects at Shopify:

New PM hires already understood how he thought; minimal onboarding needed.
Tobi (CEO) would read posts and it built the “trust battery” between them.
A Facebook executive sharing a post about a Shopify/Messenger integration shifted the CPO’s perception overnight.
Writing externally created more internal influence than internal memos could.

Practical approach: brain dump a first draft in 2 hours; spend 38 hours editing. Get early feedback from objective readers to discover how your narrative actually lands vs. how you imagine it does.

Who should write: everyone, even if never published. The clarity of thought required to write is what you owe your team, peers, and stakeholders.

Platform PM

Platform work is fundamentally different from consumer-facing product work:

Longer cycles: shipping a platform feature means: infrastructure change → API alpha → developer alpha → developer beta → end customer uses an app. 2 years for an end user to experience what you designed.
Designing a canvas, not an experience: you’re not deciding what the user sees — you’re setting bounds within which third parties create experiences.
Multi-constituent complexity: on a developer platform, you simultaneously serve developers building apps, merchants using apps, and end buyers consuming products. Policy decisions must reflect a clear stack-ranking of constituents.
Principle-first design: before any technical or design execution, establish the platform’s first principles. Shopify example: the merchant’s independence and data access takes priority over developer convenience. This principle resolves dozens of policy conflicts. Without it, every disputed case reaches the CEO the day before launch.
Psychology: celebrate incremental milestones (API going to alpha, first developer onboarding). Tell the big narrative — the team can’t see the end user effect for years.

Not a one-way door. Oscillating between platform and consumer-facing product builds a complete picture: platform PMs learn what emerges from the canvas; consumer PMs learn what platforms enable.

Remote work and bursts

Shopify went permanently remote mid-2020. Key learning: in-person still matters for creative velocity and team cohesion — but the right rhythm is concentrated bursts, not daily offices.

Bursts: one-click internal app allows teams to schedule a gathering (pure work or social+work). Flights, hotels, and food auto-booked and expensed; no individual reimbursements. Teams can use retrofitted former offices in major cities or travel locations (France, Ireland, Caribbean).

Design principle: identify everything that was bad about commuting to an office and eliminate it; identify everything good about intense in-person collaboration and make it frictionless to access.

Data benefit: the app tracks which teams haven’t gathered recently — a signal for low team energy or bandwidth problems.

Additional policy: 90 days/year of working from any country.

Career advice

For PMs wanting to level up: found a company on the side (or do a legitimate side hustle). Forces you to sell, support, ship under failure pressure — breaks the silo of “your feature, your area.” Humbles and sharpens simultaneously.

Break technical walls: even non-technical PMs can deploy a Rails clone of Twitter over a weekend using a tutorial. Once the wall is broken, momentum builds. The demystification compounds.