Archie Abrams
VP of Product & Head of Growth at Shopify
VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify leading 600+ people across product, design, engineering, data ops, and growth marketing at one of the most uniquely operated companies in tech.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Archie Abrams reveals Shopify's unconventional approach to product and growth: core product teams have no KPIs and rely on taste and a 100-year vision from CEO Tobi, while the growth team uniquely optimizes for churn reduction rather than acquisition. He explains why funnel conversion rate optimization is often counterproductive and how Shopify maintains long-term experiment holdouts to check impact years after launch.
Leadership Principles
- → Optimizing for conversion rate at each funnel step is a trap — sometimes lower conversion but more volume is better
- → Core product teams shouldn't have KPIs — decisions should be based on taste, intuition, and long-term vision
- → Keep long-term holdouts for experiments and automatically check impact 1, 2, and 3 years later
Notable Quotes
"When teams break up the world into funnel stages, it gets very seductive to optimize for conversion rate. But it's almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate."
— On the perverse incentives of funnel-stage metrics
"The best way to get more people to get to a step is just get more people in the door in the first place. That will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may give you more people on the outside."
— On Shopify's counterintuitive approach to growth
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