Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So we have a few things that we have going for us, right? So one, we have this tool called GSD, which stands for get shit done, which you've probably heard from maybe talking to other Shopify folk, which is this notion of weekly updates to the whole company on what's happening. Again, Parkinson's law at scale. If you ask people every week, they want to show progress every single week. So that's one way I talked about pair programming as well. The other thing we do as a company is, we used to have twice a year was our cadence, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or we had an event in the summer. And now, we do six-week reviews. So, teams have this notion of every six weeks actually coming together and walking through the roadmap, the resourcing, and what they're working on with their immediate leadership, but then also, with Toby. And so, what's cool about that, and by the way, it's a huge time investment, right? We all get into a room, it's happening tomorrow. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, a bunch of us will be in the office together and we're going to go through every project in the company, and we're going to talk about the project, the resourcing, how it's going, and we're going to make changes. And again, that creates intensity, because you want to show what has been done, what have you learned since the last six-week review. And, we find six weeks is a very good cadence, because it's short enough that you can remember the context and it's long enough... Six weeks is long enough, especially if you have, let's say, a team of a dozen engineers, you can do a lot. And not only that, you can do a lot in a day, but this is a check-in point. And what I've noticed too with intensity is, let's say, we get a review and there's some feedback we get in that review. We don't wait until the next six-week review, right? The next day we are building things, we are iterating, we are tagging people. And then, by the next week's we're like, "Here's the trajectory." Right? Actually, I want to get that Elon shirt made, "What have you done this week?" Because, Parkinson's law is real. It sounds funny, but I keep bringing this up, but whatever time you allot to something will be the time it takes, right? So, if you're doing something monumental, I don't know, you're doing a reorg or something, right? You can do it the slow way. "Let's sit down, and plan, and roll it out." And it's probably six months in most companies. Shopify, this is a week or two. You sit down, you're like, "Hey, this is the bones of it. Let's bring some more people and think." But then, it's going to start leaking. So we just launch it. Right? And, we do the same thing with lots of things. We just try to move more quickly and get out of the... We don't do change management, we just land it, and then go, "Hey everyone, it's a volatile company. This is what's happening. But this is how we get things done quickly." And then, move on with our lives. Wow, there's so much there. I have been through the six-month reorgs. And, I think that context you just shared of, "We're at a volatile company, we're changing things. It's not going to be smooth, but we think this is for the best." It's just the culture of Shopify. It sounds like, "We want to keep moving fast. We know this isn't going to be the smoothest thing, but we just know this better to make the change at this point versus wait." It's how Toby increased the resiliency in the company. He would walk around in the old days when we had a data center and just unplugged machines, right?…

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