Brandon Chu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Amazing. So I was looking at your LinkedIn and just hearing this story, especially the Shopify piece, it's a pretty incredible trajectory. And imagine a lot of people listening to this may be like, "Shit. How do I follow a similar path? How do I do it Brandon did." Do you have any advice about what it was that helped you, either habits, skills, behaviors that helped you get to where you're today that maybe newer PMs could learn from? I think what I learned over the arc of my career is that especially when it comes to product management specifically, it's a lot of the hard skills that PMs are known for, so organizational, analytical, good communication, even technical skills. There's sort of table stakes and commodities to be an entry level PM. And to be clear, it's not easy to be a PM. It's not an entry level job. And so that is no knock on that. I'm saying to grow beyond that though, I think domain expertise can take you a little bit further like if you're an amazing payments PM or you have some really nuanced knowledge and whatever, 3D modeling or something like that. But I think ultimately to have the highest trajectory and what certainly was a tailwind for my career was you guys have to lean into those founder skills. And so things like being a great storyteller, how to get the most out of people around you, foster creative and motivated teams and know how to make really, really hard high conviction decisions that actually can't be solved. You got to take a leap of faith and how to do that and bring teams through that type of ambiguity and then how to lead by example and have accountability when you make those choices. So I found that ultimately, those really became the things that were limiters for some careers I observed and then were definitely propelling for a lot of the people that made it to high level of leadership. Awesome. And I know you wrote a lot about a lot of these things, which we'll talk about your writing, which I'm a huge fan of and I have been a fan for a long time. But before we get into those, I want to chat a little bit about Shopify and your experience at Shopify and just understanding the product culture at Shopify. As an outsider, Shopify feels like an incredibly strong product culture. And I know a lot of amazing PMs that work there and even outside PMs, just generally amazing people. What would you say are some of the defining characteristics of how teams build product at Shopify maybe that are different from how other companies approach product?…

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