Exploring product development at one of the world's best-known product companies

Shopify is one of the world’s leading ecommerce platforms, helping millions of businesses sell products online.

From the outside, companies like Shopify can feel as though they’ve discovered something everyone else is still searching for. Joining Shopify gave me the chance to find out whether that was true.

I joined the team that would go on to build Shopify Collective, exploring how merchants could sell products from other merchants’ stores while keeping inventory, fulfilment and shipping in sync.

One of the things I enjoyed most was helping an engineering-led team explore a more collaborative way of working. Bringing Product, Design and Engineering together earlier helped us move faster through uncertainty and make better decisions together.

The pace at Shopify was unlike anywhere I’d worked before. It wasn’t the speed that stood out, I’ve spent most of my career working in fast-moving startups. It was the sheer volume of work, conversations and decisions all moving at that pace across an organisation that had grown incredibly quickly.

That experience helped me understand where I do my best work. I enjoy moving quickly, but I also enjoy having enough context and enough agency to help shape the direction of the product, not just my part of it.

Seeing behind the curtain was reassuring. There wasn’t a secret formula. Just talented people, working incredibly hard on a product customers genuinely loved.

Wondering what I learnt from working at Shopify?

It helped me understand the kind of environment where I do my best work: one with enough speed to keep learning, enough context to make good decisions and enough agency to make a meaningful difference. That’s shaped how I approach product.