Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify and the power of writing

Executive overview

Brandon Chu, VP of Product at Shopify, discusses how writing crystallized his thinking about product management and accelerated his career by a decade. He shares Shopify's distinctive product culture—rooted in technical rigor, distributed ownership, and founder mentality—and reveals how the company pivoted during COVID to focus entirely on merchant survival. He also explores the unique challenges of platform product management and the long feedback cycles required to succeed in that domain.

Core insight: Writing is not just communication—it's the forcing function that helps you actually figure out what you think.

How Shopify's product culture differs

• Technical foundation: Everyone from engineers to support to sales owns product thinking; it's not siloed to PMs.
• Founder mentality: 30–40% of Shopify's PM team are ex-founders, fostering versatility, grit, and empathy for entrepreneurs.
• Distributed decision-making: At junior levels, PMs collaborate across crafts (design, engineering); at director+ levels, PMs lead strategic direction.
• Servant leadership model: PM job description is to "help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way"—not dictatorship.

Shopify's annual planning and flexibility

Investment plans set broad directional vision for major teams (20% organizational chunks), then teams execute chaotically toward those goals while remaining willing to throw it all away if the world changes. This flexibility became critical during COVID when roadmaps disappeared overnight.

COVID response: From vision to survival

When lockdowns hit, Shopify pivoted from grand 2020 visions to pure survival mode. Focus shifted entirely to helping merchants adapt—both brick-and-mortar and online only:

• Gift cards (launched in two weeks) let consumers support struggling restaurants and stores.
• Buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) features enabled physical retailers to capture online sales.
• The team went from planning 40 initiatives to shipping only three critical ones.
• Wartime intensity lasted roughly a year (into mid-2021) but evolved into permanent culture shift.

Remote work innovations: The Burst system

Shopify was already remote-friendly (founded in Ottawa) but formalized this with internal infrastructure:

• Bursts are quarterly team gatherings—one-click booking of flights, hotels, and activities (Laguna Beach, Ireland, France).
• 90-day travel policy allows employees to work from anywhere for three months per year.
• Converted old offices into community spaces for local meetups.
• Data tracking shows which teams haven't gathered recently, prompting manager check-ins.

The insight: Remote-only culture works best when you intentionally get together often for high-velocity creative work and human connection.

The impact of writing on career trajectory

Brandon wrote ~300 Medium posts over several years, crystallizing mental models while executing at Shopify. Key realizations:

• Writing forces clarity: The act of writing—not pre-existing mastery—helped him understand his own thinking. He figured things out at the moment he wrote them.
• Rapid career changes gave vantage: Moving through roles quickly (as Shopify scaled 500 → 12,000+ people) let him contrast contexts and observe patterns.
• Extreme effort: 40 hours per post (sometimes 2 hours brain dump + 38 hours editing).
• External momentum drives internal influence: Posts shared by influential figures (e.g., David Marcus) built trust internally with executives.

Two major effects: pre-onboarding new team members (they already knew how he thought) and attracting talent who specifically wanted to work for him.

Why PMs should write (whether public or not)

Even unpublished writing clarifies thinking and sharpens articulation. In a remote, digital world, this skill matters more than ever:

• Articulate your ideas clearly to teams, peers, and stakeholders.
• Break the feedback loop: seeing how others react to your writing teaches you how to structure narratives.
• Get comfortable with raw, unfinished thinking—share early and iterate.

Brandon stopped writing around 2020 (had kids, exec demands multiplied, feared disappointing readers with lower-quality posts). He considers it the most important thing he's done for his career.

Platform product management: A different problem domain

Brandon spent years building Shopify's developer platforms and APIs. Key psychological and strategic shifts:

• Longer feedback loops: 5–10x longer cycles than user-facing product. You're designing infrastructure, opening APIs (alpha → beta), waiting for developers to build, then months more for end-customers to use the result.
• Celebrate milestones, not endpoints: No press release when an API goes live—you must narrate the impact to keep teams motivated.
• Articulate platform principles early: Stack-rank your constituents (merchants, developers, consumers). Shopify prioritizes merchants' independence; Amazon prioritizes consumers. These choices create second-order effects (e.g., which stakeholder gets pissed off, data sharing policies).
• Oscillate between user-facing and platform work for well-rounded career growth.

Making good decisions as a PM (Brandon's most-cited post)

The framework prioritizes ruthlessly:

1. Identify decision importance (reversible vs. irreversible, affects many users materially or not).
2. Spend all your time on critical decisions—involve the team, debate, think hard.
3. Use your gut on everything else—delegate or decide fast to keep velocity high.

Corollary: After a few non-catastrophic mistakes, your threshold for what's "truly important" raises. Don't sweat every decision.

Final advice for PMs: Do a side hustle

• Build a startup or product on the side; live through sales, support, shipping, and failure.
• Humbles you about the effort and people required to build software.
• For non-technical PMs: break the code obscurity wall. Build a simple Twitter clone with a Ruby on Rails tutorial. Deploy it. Your mind opens up.
• One legitimate side project > a year of passive learning.