Metadata
- Author: Peter Yang
- Full Title:: Kaz Nejatian (COO, Shopify): Why Shopify Elevated the Non-Manager Career Path and Ditched Meetings
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Engineering Management,
- URL:: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/kaz-coo-shopify-craft-and-no-meetings
- Finished date:: 2023-07-13
Highlights
You end up with smart, highly credentialed individuals spending all their time writing strategy memos to increase their team size so that they can write even more strategy memos (View Highlight)
Great products are built through continuous tinkering and adjustments (View Highlight)
We don’t over-index on OKRs. Many important things can’t be measured and not everything that can be measured is important. (View Highlight)
That’s not to say there isn’t a role for measurement. Measurement is crucial for making sure that you’re doing the right thing. However, building products isn’t the same as being a stock broker. (View Highlight)
I can’t teach taste or the kind of extreme ownership over problems that we require, nor can I teach customer empathy. I can help fine-tune these skills, but my job is to select people who already possess these qualities (View Highlight)
Managers should be empowering crafters and it’s hard to do that without being one yourself (View Highlight)
Does Shopify have a strong writing culture to help people communicate without meetings? Yes, we try to make async decisions as much as we can. We do this in a few ways:
- One of our mantras is “Do things, tell people.” You’ll see this plastered on our walls if you come to Shopify’s office.
- We built an operating system called GSD (get shit done). This internal tool emphasizes frequent written updates, which are much easier to digest than constant meetings (View Highlight)
A meeting is a bug that some other process didn’t work out. When an ad hoc meeting happens, we try to understand why written exchanges didn’t work to make improvements. (View Highlight)