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Brandon Chu

Episode #40

VP of Product (at time of recording)

Shopify

🚀Career & Leadership🎯Product Strategy👥Team & Culture

📝Full Transcript

9,934 words
Lenny (00:03): If you're a product manager, you've almost certainly come across one of Brandon Chu's Medium posts. His writing about all aspects of the job is some of the best writing out there on the skills of being a PM, and has informed a lot of my thinking on both product management and writing. Brandon is currently a VP of Product at Shopify, where he's been for seven years, and in our conversation, we talk about what it's like to build product at Shopify, what Shopify has learned about being effective working remotely, having done it from day one, the impact of writing on one's career and how to get started, the benefits of becoming a platform PM, the manager track versus the IC track, and a bunch of other stuff. Brandon is a wealth of knowledge on the art of product management, and I'm really excited to bring this episode to you. (00:46): Do you want to reduce friction in your onboarding flow? Then let me tell you about Stytch, and that's Stytch with a Y. Stytch is on a mission to eliminate friction from the internet. They're starting by making user authentication and onboarding more seamless and more secure. They offer super flexible, out of the box authentication solutions for companies of all sizes, from email magic links to SMS pass codes, one tap social logins, to even biometrics. Stytch is your all-in-one platform for authentication. Stytch customers have been able to increase conversion by over 60% after spending just one day integrating, and with their API and SDKs, you can improve user conversion and retention and security all while saving valuable engineering time. Your engineers will come and thank you for using Stytch, because Stytch keeps you from having to build authentication in-house, and the integration process is super fast and super smooth. To get 1,000 dollars in free credits, just go to stytch.com, and that's Stytch with a Y, and sign up and just mention that I sent you. (01:52): This episode is brought to you by Persona. Persona helps ...

📚Methodologies (3)

🚀 Career & Leadership

A framework for managing the overwhelming volume of decisions a Product Manager faces by categorizing them based on stakes and reversibility to optimize for speed versus quality.

Core Principles

  • 1.Determine the importance of a decision immediately (is it reversible? is it material?).
  • 2.Most decisions (98%) are low-stakes or reversible; use 'gut feel' or delegate these to maintain high team velocity.
  • 3.Reserve 90%+ of mental energy and time for the top 1-2% of mission-critical, irreversible decisions.
  • +1 more...

"If you're going to be a really good PM, you have to have that skill... spend all your time on those very few important decisions. And for all other decisions, you should just literally just go with whatever your gut is."

#triage#velocity#decision
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🎯 Product Strategy

A prioritization model specifically for platform PMs to resolve conflicts between multiple stakeholders (Merchants, Developers, Buyers) by establishing a clear hierarchy of needs.

Core Principles

  • 1.Recognize that platforms have multi-sided markets with competing incentives.
  • 2.Establish a hard 'stack rank' of constituents before conflicts arise.
  • 3.Make policy and design choices that favor the top constituent, even if it hurts those lower in the stack.
  • +1 more...

"You have to understand those principles and the stack rank of the constituents there to be able to make good policy and design choices."

#platform#constituent#stack
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👥 Team & Culture

A hybrid operating model that combines 'digital by default' remote work with intentional, high-intensity in-person gatherings called 'Bursts' to foster creativity and connection.

Core Principles

  • 1.Work is digital by default; hire from anywhere.
  • 2.In-person time is still critical for energy and creativity, not just status updates.
  • 3.Use infrastructure (internal apps) to remove friction from meeting up (booking flights/hotels automatically).
  • +1 more...

"We tried to turn all the weaknesses on its head... optimize for the stuff that was amazing about [in-person] and make it super easy and fun."

#'digital-burst'#collaboration#team
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