Brandon Chu: recommendation

Transcript context

…I want to chat about the PM career track, but maybe before we get into that, I know you haven't written this post, but for someone that's designing a platform or an ecosystem, is there any kind of just guiding frameworks or rules of thumb that you've come to to help you make some of these decisions that you talked about? I actually say the first thing is as a PM, your psychology has to really change around your own validation. So usually, you can build a product, ship it, customers tell you if it's good or not. The cycles for platform work are five to 10 odd times longer. You're maybe changing something on the infrastructure level, then opening up an API and then doing an alpha period for the API where developers now build on that and test things. And then you move into a beta. And then finally, two years later, some end customer actually uses that app, right, for this. And you're not designing actually the end user's experience. You're designing a canvas for developers to build their own creative ideas on. And it's just a very different type of work. And so I would say that's the first thing psychologically is be prepared for those much longer cycles. Surround yourself with people on your teams that find ways to enjoy that process and also find ways to celebrate rewards along the way like we would, not rewards, but celebrate shipping things along the way. When that API went into alpha, there's no press release, but how do you make the team feel amazing about that work? Right? You have to tell the big narrative about this is going to change how merchants actually get different apps in these areas or whatnot. And here's some of the crazy things that we're seeing in the early adoption, et cetera. So that's my main thing on psychology. I'd say in terms of preparing yourself, you really have to think about before you even get into the technical or design execution of any particular platform area, really think about the principles behind the platform that you're building. So an example, and then a contrast with Shopify's, in Amazon's platform, I'm making this up, but I assume that a pretty big important intro principle is that if there's ever a toss up between deciding between the seller and the buyer, the consumer, we're going to decide with the consumer. Right? That's why every time you refund something on Amazon, anytime you got a complaint, send you another one. Right? They made that trade off to be a consumer focused platform and obviously, that's been amazing for them, but you also hear the contrasting stories of sellers that are really pissed off Amazon that have ruined their businesses and whatnot. So not to hate on that, but that's a second order effect of that decision. In Shopify's case, we are here to support entrepreneurs and businesses in making their dreams come true and creating independence. And that is sometimes at the cost of developers on our platform. And so sometimes we may make a data policy change saying, "Hey. It's more important that the merchant has access to this data across apps. And it's important that actually you push that data back in Shopify so that you don't hold that data back so that this other app can't use it. " t that the merchant has access to this data across apps. And it's important that actually you push that data back in Shopify so that you don't hold that data back so that this other app can't use it." And now we're sending the same end customer two marketing texts when they've already opted out of marketing texts or something like that. And so this is where you have to understand those principles and the stack rank of the constituents there to be able to make good policy and design choices. And I think it's something that if you're not conscious of early as a platform PM, you will blow up some stuff or there will be some bad instances that come up or you'll get blocked by the CEO or whatever on the day before it launches, which has happened to me.…

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