People were falling from the sky: Scaling Product and Platform at Shopify

The synergy between product and development teams is perhaps one of the most underrated advantages a business can have. In our latest episode, we’re joined by Brandon Chu, an expert in scaling products and a former professional poker player. With years of hands-on experience, Brandon shares invaluable insights he’s acquired throughout his personal and professional journey.

Formerly of Shopify, FreshBooks and Kraft Foods group, Brandon guides us on how to align product and engineering organizations to effectively scale, transition to a developer-focused product, and set up your teams for success by starting small.

Join as we discuss: 

• Setting a strong foundation for product and engineering
• Transitioning to a developer-focused product
• Start teams small and then grow (avoid wasted eng resources)

Setting a strong foundation for product and engineering

As with anything else in life, your way of making foundational decisions is informed by your life experience. Chu’s approach is influenced by the lessons he has learned during his professional poker journey, and it shows.

While, today, he’s a strategic mastermind, he’s also humble about the mistakes or seemingly short-sighted decisions that he made, too. This is why he’s one of the best people to learn from.

Product and business development are two different worlds

A lesson that Chu learned the hard way, having “flash quit” his job with his cofounder of a venture, raising funding and riding the startup rollercoaster.

Your product is the end result of many processes working in harmony but, even if you achieve the perfect product, you still need to deal with investors, employees, partners and customers if you want to navigate toward business success.

Having sold the venture, Chu shares one of the most important lessons he learned: “Post-graduation from university, you can learn completely new things and be quite good at them.”

Hard lessons make the journey easier over time

Being told that a founder’s role was effectively that of a project manager, Chu allowed himself to explore what he could do by working as the latter.

He found that his ability to make a high volume of decisions on a daily basis (usually a stress-inducing experience) came in handy for this chapter of his career.

Chu blended together all of his knowledge and experience up to that point when he reflected on the factors of effective growth:

• Motivating your team is essential
• Your company culture is a major influence on your company’s progress
• Introduce systems and workflows
• Lean on frameworks and adapt them slightly if that’s sensible

Transitioning to a product focused culture

Part of the challenge that Chu encountered during his career journey was the resistance to hire product-focused employees, from leaders within business teams.

He discovered that some leaders assumed product teams added no significant value because they weren’t traditional ‘builders’ and that those who actively contributed to the code base were thinking about the end product anyway — so, what was the point?

It showed in the organogram, too, since there were less than a handful of employees who even had the word ‘product’ in their job titles at the time Chu joined his next team.

The change management approach

Immediately upon entering the team, Chu remembers joining a meeting and being challenged by direct questions in his very first meeting: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

When you’re a product manager, it’s difficult to answer questions like this because it’s not as easily quantifiable as writing a certain number of lines of code or pushing a new feature into production as a tangible output.

In response, Chu emphasized his focus on the customer’s experience and how he would help adjust processes like going to market or decisions around features to help improve upon the overarching goal.

He got to work educating the executives and sharing insights as to why product focus held value for the business.

To effect change, you ideally need champions inside your business leadership team who can back you and ensure that you have access to sufficient and correct resources.

It’s exactly what Chu achieved because he focused on principles that business leaders could relate to and were happy to support and share throughout the company.

Stay organized and communicate

It’s a challenge when you’re spending most of your days in the weeds, trying to find your way through technical challenges. This is the case for most engineers who are constantly writing and editing code.

This is where the value of the product team comes in, as they can usually see beyond the code into how the project development journey is affecting aspects such as customer satisfaction, market sentiment and trends in support requests.

When developers trust product teams (who understand how developers think and work), working together makes them unstoppable.

Chu recalls, “Success would be defined by engineering teams submitting requests for PMs, which happened within six months.” It was the indication of the paradigm shift that his team needed, in order to ramp up the value being created within the business.

Small teams prevent resource wastage

Engineering resources, in particular, can drastically drive up a company’s operating costs.

To avoid this, Chu recommends keeping teams small at first and letting them grow organically. A small team working in sync can produce more and higher quality outputs than a larger highly qualified team working with fragmented and scattered methods.

Operational DNA can evolve

The way that you work with a small team is not effective for larger teams where more people are involved.

Chu recalls his own experience, going from a small functional team of mostly engineers to a larger team with a divisional matrix, where each product line in the business required the input of leaders, midweight decision-makers and operational engineers altogether.

Don’t be afraid to start small and flex the way you need, as you grow.

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Need more insight on scaling your product? Listen to the full episode for useful techniques.