Farhan Thawar: belief

Transcript context

…That's a great example. And, as you're describing the ways that you create intensity and velocity within Shopify, it's interesting that what you're listing is a bunch of meetings and check ins, which to most people would feel like, "Why do we need so many..." There's all this like, "Less meetings." And I know you guys famously cancel all your meetings and that's a whole thing we can talk about. But, it's interesting that more check ins and regular check ins allow you to move faster. I imagine it's partly because it just makes sure you're not working on things that are unnecessary, and dumb, and not going to be used. And it's just continue to refine, these are actually the most important. I mean, it's a combination of trust but verify, right? Because don't forget, the goal of the check-in is not for you to be like, "Ha, ha, I caught you not doing your work." It's not like the Dilbert boss, "Hey, did you do your thing?" Right? Even when I look at the Elon text, which is like, "Hey, what did you get done this week?" It wasn't to try to catch Parag in a, "You didn't do anything or you did a bunch of useless stuff." It was hopefully to pair on the problem, meaning, when I ask somebody, "Hey, did we move forward on this LLM project, because we now have this larger context window?" And then, they came back and said, "Oh, here's what we learned." So then, I can then look at the answer and say, "Oh, so now, have you thought of this? Have you tried..." It's a way to pair on the problem. So, we have this word, everybody talks about micromanagement as a word, and we don't actually think it's a dirty word at Shopify, but the reason we don't think it's a dirty word is because it's not just, again, Dilbert boss saying, "Where did you do the thing?" It's like, "Hey, can I work on this problem with you? And if I work on this problem with you, I got to see where you are pretty often, and then give you advice, or you're going to share context with me, because I'm not in the work every day." To then come back and say, "Oh, based on what I know and what you know, can we move this in this direction? Maybe that's better for merchants. " I don't want to overuse the pairing paradigm, but it is really much like, "Can I pair with you?" And I learned this actually very early in my Shopify tenure, because Toby would have these one-on-ones with me and I'd be like, "Toby, you don't have to waste your time, man. You hired me. I got this." Well, he goes, "Oh, you misunderstand why you're here. We are here to work on problems together." And I was like, "Oh, I didn't even think..." I thought he hired me to take problems away. He hired me to work on problems with me. That's completely different than what I thought. I love that. Okay. One thing you mentioned is meeting thing. For people that don't know what you all did with meetings, I think it might be worth just sharing that briefly, because it's awesome and something a lot of companies can learn from.…

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