Balancing Short-Term Wins with Long-Term Growth | 4min snip from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth

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Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

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CHAPTER

Balancing Short-Term Wins with Long-Term Growth

This chapter explores the distinction between immediate successes and sustainable growth, using payment failure notifications as a case study. It emphasizes the challenges of measuring the impact of product experiments, illustrating how initial results may not reflect long-term benefits such as customer retention and overall sales.

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Archie Abrams is the VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, where he leads a 600+ person growth org across product, design, engineering, data, ops, and growth marketing. Shopify powers over 10% of e-commerce in the United States, with $235 billion in GMV in 2023 (roughly the size of Finland’s economy). He previously led Consumer product and growth at Lyft and was at Udemy for 8 years as SVP of Product having joined the company when it was 10 people. In our conversation, we discuss:

• Why Shopify optimizes for churn

• Why the core product team doesn’t use metrics-based goals

• Why they keep multi-year experiment holdouts

• How they structure their growth team

• The benefits of not having a CMO

• Lessons learned about integrating sales into a product-led growth model

• The power of discounting as a growth lever

• Much more

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