Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…The best gift in life is finding a beautiful problem that you can never solve. And even if you accidentally solve it, if you're so unfortunate to solve it, hopefully it has plenty of enlightened problem children. Consumerism is like a thing that is being thrown around, but where does it come from? But they throw away things because they hate the things they have. The thing that solves consumerism is quality product, personalized ads is a wonderful thing. I am scrolling past something that's monetizing the free application that I appreciate using. You should tell the EU this. Yes, well, I do actually. Some people fall in love with solutions. Some people fall in love with problems and I just like fundamentally, I'm a person who appreciates some people who fall in love with problems. But it's very hard to know who is who because well, if you don't change anything, they look exactly the same. What's the point? You only have half an Irish pub? This set? Well, this is our MVP when we weren't even sure that this would be a thing. Tobias Lütke launched Shopify in 2006. We've been working closely with them for over a decade and I always enjoy getting together with Tobi and I always learn a lot. Cheers. I think the core part of Shopify, minus stuff like the identity system and these kind of things, it's like 20 million lines of code. And then the TypeScript written admin interface is another I think 8, 9, 10. It's apparently one of the largest TypeScript applications and definitely have the largest Ruby applications. So we pushed it into pretty uncharted territories for our tech stacks. It does so much, it's like a full fintech business in there with capital and these kinds of things and all of what we are doing together. And my company adopts the complexity, the real life messy complexities of the commerce world into itself to then front it with approachable interfaces, things that don't… Just making all the pieces fit together. And so that requires a lot of work. So there's like thousands of projects going on at any given time. So going through all of them is work, but we have a good system. We have a product operations team that prepares for it. We have an internal system that's just for the reviews, which is actually kind of cool. Because you're good enough and so there isn't pressure to get better beyond some point. Yeah, I mean, take an example: I talked with some executives in the gold mining space. It's just really sort of interesting. Because I’m like, “What is your day like?” The same question. It's much more interesting. What is a gold mining executive’s day like? es in the gold mining space. It's just really sort of interesting. Because I’m like, “What is your day like?” The same question. It's much more interesting. What is a gold mining executive’s day like? I mean my conclusion, which wasn't maybe what he was trying to guide me to was, essentially government relations or investor relations, if you know how much is in the ground, it's a capital play. But somehow if the investors like you better, then you get a higher multiple at which point it behooves you to purchase all the other gold mines really quickly. So I imagine it involves playing golf, because that’s probably the technology there. So isn't one of the conundrums for you, as someone who thinks about companies and organizations a lot, the lack of measurability of R&D, which is probably half of what Shopify spends its money on is R&D. And so if you're running a factory, it's pretty easy to measure the inputs and outputs and how many widgets are reproducing per hour and what's the labor efficiency and everything like that. It's very measurable. Whereas when you're building software it's like, “I don’t know, we put a bunch of engineers on it and hopefully in six months they have a great product out there in the market.” But the intermediate measure is yeah, you can measure pull requests per engineer per day or whatever and everyone knows that's a very broken proxy. And lots of thoughts on this specifically. I would love to actually know how you think about this too. So traditionally when you look back in business history about when people got a little bit scientific about business or actually started to improve them, clearly it all started as sort of a vibe space. Then Frederick Taylor came up and brought the wonderful new technology of stopwatch to the production line and timed the various steps, and of course produced I think Bethlehem Steel, at the end of the 1800s and drove massive efficiency gains. And so that's like the hero's journey of business books. And that’s still so much of the corporate culture today. It's how org charts tend to be structured. It's how the financial statements are, the kind of business that financial statements are optimized for is kind of a factory. In a world where almost no company was terribly conscientious and no company metabolized all the value available to them. Someone starting to hill climb some source of efficiency gains, or just becoming a better company, was a breathtaking change. Once someone starts hill climbing, everyone has to or gets left behind. So that became the story and it's remarkable to think that that was probably good enough for probably 80 years or 90 years from this point on. Right, it's— It's a lean basically, which is kind of the 2.0 of that. Exactly. So you said a car industry with exactly Toyota and so on, some new ideas came on but they were all around the drive for efficiency. The downside of a drive to efficiency is that it requires you to act on quantifiables. You can only measure what you can measure thematically. So that's not the entire space of how to make better companies. There's a huge amount of things that are unquantifiable— taste, quality is hard to quantify. measure what you can measure thematically. So that's not the entire space of how to make better companies. There's a huge amount of things that are unquantifiable— taste, quality is hard to quantify. Well not only that, because those are the obvious examples of unquantifiables, but the big one is… I'm curious, there's team at Shopify that's doing a great job of their product and there's a team that's lost and has kind of a wooly direction and actually their dev tools suck and so it's very hard for them to make forward progress and they're thrashing with lots of “keep the lights on” work. Just how do you distinguish between the team that's struggling and the team that's executing really well? Yeah, I mean this is why my answer is…here's what I've found works: have rituals by which we talk at the latest every eight weeks, and so let the teams talk about the progress against the goal. We have an internal system called GSD— getting shit done. It's for the central register clearinghouse, it's our wiki, it's our feeds and stuff like this. But it also has every project in it. And so it's built around teams updating everyone else registering, “Here's something we learned.” And so that was step number one. Let's get the actual state of a business into a legible internal system, by which you can reason about it. Where is every project, what are the deadlines, what has changed? And so this is what these reviews are about. his is what we have on the screen—they get a little tldraw that we can drag images and mockups and everything into, but that's their area. But all the metrics and all the things are on the screen right in front of everyone and we can talk about that and how many people are on a team and this kind of stuff. And giving everyone an opportunity to just talk to me, even if it's only quickly, is incredibly valuable. Is it like people want to get into running? The couch to 5K program starts with:get off the couch, go walk down the block, go walk down two blocks and things like that. It turns out that from an organizational point of view, having a centralized source where you track all the projects and you list out your goals and you post updates…that sounds too simple to work in the same way that getting off the couch is too simple as a step to running a marathon. But it turns out both are true. I think honestly it's not a complex idea and it's extremely valuable for 15 other reasons, other than it powering these reviews. But yeah, it's not terribly complex and it works. No, we took inspiration from GSD—your system—as we built out ours similarly. Having a centralized internal source of truth for projects that are going on is surprisingly helpful and it feels like it shouldn't be. But it is.…

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