No one literally no one said I want to grow up and sit in meetings all day long. And no one came to Shopify to sit in meetings. People came here to help entrepreneurs succeed, help founders. And it just so happens to like do really good work as a builder. You need focus time and focus time and meantime are all positive things from each other. If you don't shut the focus time. And if your entire day is petted by half hour meetings here and there, you just can't ever get going.
Even if Vengo had to paint what's potentially interrupted by someone every 20 minutes. Today my guest is Kaz Nejatian, Chief Operating Officer at Shopify. Kaz and I spoke about why traditional career ladders are broken, why strategy is the least important part of building products, and why Shopify cancelled all recurring meetings. I think this interview will feel like therapy if you ever worked at big tech companies. Be sure to like and subscribe for more interviews like this.
Now let's dive in. Alright Kaz, I'm super excited to talk to you today. I think I haven't worked at Shopify myself, right? But I really liked the post that Toby wrote about Shopify being a craft centric company. Just curious what's the difference between crafters and managers to you. Yeah, look, that's an interesting thing because the main difference is about what is your primary job. But what is the thing you spend most of your job doing, right? There's a famous coregram essay called Builder Time and Manager Time. And I think it kind of gets to the same idea, which is
when you are at work, what is the most important thing you do, what's the most your time spent on doing? And most people want their primary job to be building, right? To actually be building things. And unfortunately, most companies aren't built for those people who spend most of their time building. Most companies are built for people who want to spend most of their time managing. It's because of very weird incentive companies because the people who build companies are managers, they're optimized for the wrong thing. So our job at Shopify is to make sure that they're not going to be able to do it.
It's a place a crafter's paradigm. You clearly obstacle from crafters so we can do the best work and can be rewarded for doing that work. Yeah, that's amazing. I think a lot of product people, engineers, they actually really love the craft. But, you know, I've worked at many different companies. And if you look at the job ladders of some of these companies, it's always like, oh, you want to become director, you got to manage like five people or like, you got to grow your head count, right? So how do you kind of like celebrate the crafter or like the IC or like, you know, yeah, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I
don't know that traditional job ladders that essentially everyone stole from the army post World War II, I just totally broken. They're just broken, right? Like, you understand why in the army, you wouldn't want a general that has no direct reports that make no sense in an army. But most things aren't the arms. Right. So one of the things you done is actually completely bifurcated job levels that Shopify. So there's a management.
Track and a crafter track and they both go up to same levels. They both go down the same level and like, so in order to get promoted and get more money, more responsibility, broader scope. You don't need more people, right? So you can actually, and it's incredibly difficult to do this because most systems aren't designed to do this, right? One of the things that says, what if you completely blocked yourself from considering number of people in the, in a career ladder for crap?
Now, most of you that you actually, actually realized what type of things you care about, like is management complicated? Sure. But is leading open source project, the effects, the entire Ruby code base also complicated. Yes, that's also complicated. It's a different level of complication. And in some ways, it's just cheaper and easier hack to think about complication equals the number of people, which is just totally wrong.
Yeah, I totally agree. And you know, talking to someone who was like a CPU company before and now he's just going back to being either like an IC or like a just like a line level manager. He told me like what he really loves is just like going to a room and talking to engineers and like doing a whiteboard, yeah, pounding customers. And that's kind of what I really love doing too. And like as companies scale, like internal optics, stop becoming more important.
If you don't fight against it, like, you know, like some examples is like, you know, people spend a ton of time on executive presentations or like, you know, it's kind of stuff. So how do you guys prevent this stuff from happening as Shopify grows? I mean, it's already a big company.
Yeah, I mean, part of our job at Shopify is to be a company that rages against being a big company that's like literally part of our job to be a flat company built of fractures rather than like, And I think what happens is that there's a pernicious like an exercise where especially for product managers were executive product reviews become kind of a show.
What it is on pixel perfect and we just like products like this, one of the ways we fight this is by literally telling people to not spend our time by limiting the tools they can use presentations, such that they're not like designed to be pixel perfect, right? Yeah, that's one point. So we actually jump into code very frequently in product reviews and Shopify. We literally dump directly into coaxing, show me the code. Let's see how this would work.
And the way we actually build product of Shopify is different than most companies where we build products in stages. The first page called proposal will be like, hey, I want to propose a product to be built. The second stage prototype, you actually have to prototype the thing and see how it would work in code. And then we do a review at prototype stage, which changes like no one ever asks in a product review and Shopify.
Well, what is this strategy for this? That's the least meaningful part of whether it's a good product or not. So actually like this idea that every part manager should be like kind of an internal like the McKinsey or BCG consultant in the big company. It's the bad idea. If you're objectively wrong or you want it to be the extremely user focused, have a high degree of empathy for users, taking insane amount of ownership over problems. And then be risk maximizing machines, right?
If you don't care for it, if it's not those three things and what PMs become is keepers of strategy quote unquote, we end up having actually the worst of both worlds. We have not having very spot people who are incredibly could I showed spending all their time writing strategy memos whose only job is to increase headcounts so they can write more strategy memos. Like instead of shipping products, you should career plans. Yes. The job of Shopify is to build products.
Our job isn't to build career matters. So we focus on our product reviews on what product is shipping rather than our strategy. Yeah, you should be my therapist. This is a resident so much to with me. I've seen a lot of like really good optics PMs. They have this like big vision like this like three years strategy. And then they just shipped to MEP and they never actually ship anything else that's it. So it's like what the what do the customer has to get from your big vision doc?
People misunderstand. People very broadly misunderstand how products are built. People who cause play as product builders assume good products are built by like a fear of five or stretch documents. That's 100 built good products are built by Takerring but the actual tinkering at the edges of a thing. That's how they're built. And basically everything you ever use or love has been built that same way. Yes. And it's just I think you're going to understand the value.
What value creation is a product writers and why he buys himself on the product manager. Yeah. How does Shopify like PMs or other roles staying touch the customer? Like is there a lot of like hurdles to jump through to even talk to your customer or anyone can just go off and talk to you. No, it's a pretty job to talk to customers. You talk to customers all the time. In fact, even better you should be a customer lots of shop at block managers have stores. I have a store Toby has a store.
Harley has a store. We have stores that we sell the things on. Yeah. It's not like a common thing and part of our job is to talk customers all the time. I think the customer's almost every day. And one of the things we do that sounds very helpful, which I think more companies should do. We have like every one at Shopify can become a customer service rep for a little while. And just ask the questions of things that are just totally through board and that allows you to feel the pain.
It's also honestly helpful because but in many ways because we the type of customers we have like our job is to serve independent business owners. And the people who want to create a thing that doesn't exist. And in many ways they're like us. They're builders just a builders of different kinds. We build software they build brands and so they can kind of speak our language, which is very helpful. Yeah, they're basically all entrepreneurs. Yeah, right. So it's very helpful. It's also very helpful.
It's also very helpful. It's Shopify is full of ex founders. So it's a company building four founders, but built by founders or people who at least are very founder like. These are people who in shop like Warren founders have the founder mentality. Yeah. I'll be like I get a lot a lot better of ex founders at this large companies than like corporate types. You know, I'm not a founder myself. Yeah. It's hard to imagine what shop I would look like if it was run by corporate types.
Honestly, you're probably actually probably would have never been built to be honest in this first place. Because no corporate type thought this would be a good business. Right. Yeah. In fact, every five years, trying to be more written about Shopify from when shopper was started, even at IPO. It was like, this is a pretty bad business. It's like, that's great. Cool. Thanks. Yeah, that's interesting.
How do you guys, you know, like a lot of other big tech companies really focus on the numbers, right? Like you're going to hit some OKR. Well, we're not one on OKR company. Actually, there's lots of important things that can't be measured. Yeah. And not everything that can be measured is important. And we believe the problem is if you are too focused on making turning one into 1.1. Yeah. You will just for go like everything else that is good and that matters.
So there we are now in a different company. That's on how we think about product building. We're a company of crafters focused on tinkering and perpetual feedback motions. And we think the way we think about it. Our job is to answer the following question. You can build one of three things that Shopify. You can build platforms. You can build parts and features. You can build experience. There's three things you can do.
And I don't like spend a bunch of our time trying to figure out what the right OKR for like each of those things are. Yeah. And we see what happens in lots of companies. Like half the meetings is just taken up deciding if you can measure the right thing. Yeah. Or we can just go build the right thing. And I find a lot easier. And I think it's not the same thing as being a stock broker. It just isn't. It's just different jobs. There's a matter of like having taste.
And you kind of know where a product resumes with the customer or not. You kind of know how to feel it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't like unfortunately this is why I think there's so few good product managers in the world. It's not a thing that I can really feel it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't like unfortunately this is why I think there's so few good product managers in the world. It's not a thing that I can really take a teach. I can't teach taste.
I can't teach you to be the type of person that takes an extreme amount of ownership over every problem. I can't really teach you to have empathy. I can help you find two those things obviously. But my job is to pick the people who have those three things already. Yeah, exactly. Like it's a lot of people's core value, I think. Like they want to get. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Cool. That's awesome. I love that culture. Yeah, that's awesome. Let's talk about the other cat, the topic meetings.
So at the beginning of the year, you had this operation called chaos monkeys. And it basically just like cancel or recurring meetings. I'm just curious like, how do you guys end up doing this? Was it during like winter break? You're like, this is like not. Yeah, really over a Chris break. Like conversation and then like we brought the code to do it. It literally happened over a Chris break. Yeah. I think Toby and I were talking about about how.
It is terrible like what you want to do and what you end up doing. Like no one literally no one said I want to grow up and sit in meetings all day long. And no one came to Shopify to sit in meetings. People came here to and help entrepreneurs succeed, help founders. And it just so happens to like do really good work as a builder. You need focus time and focus time and meantime. All positive things from each other. You need unentropic focus time.
And if your entire day is peppered by half hour meetings here and there, you just can't ever get going. Yeah. It's like imagine if they go had to paint what's actually entrupted by someone every 20 minutes. Like it's just. Yeah, so and the work we do is like honestly closer to that. It is having a widget factory. Right? That's all working. It's especially closer to like that. So I think it's important. Unetrupted time is like precious. And what we did was two things. I actually like both.
We just see the thing is where we like cast all meetings. One three people or reinstated our no meeting Wednesday. Remove the bunch of childs every thought. I'm not sorry. But the more important thing we did was we changed the default. We changed the default answer for a meeting from being yes to no. So if someone says you counter invite the default answers. Yes, unless you otherwise busy. The answer is no unless you need to be in that meeting. Right? So the default answer change.
And this is like immense. It would chop us in really more productive this year. It was like deleted from the next 322 hours of meetings. That's like yeah, 36 years worth of meetings. And we've seen like the average time people spend in meetings is down like 33%. The company is sitting 25% faster. It's been meaningful change in Shopify. Yeah, that sounds amazing. So basically like is less like also no five years strategy behind this. It was a really very strategy dog.
We just wrote the code to the chaos funky. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, dude, like no, no startup rise of five years strategy. Like that. That's just both bullshit. I mean, you know what house going to five years? Yeah. It's the world moving too fast for me to know what's happening five years from now. Like my job is to keep our merchants on the leading edge of technology. Such that when you choose Shopify, you're making the ideal choice. There will always keep you tech forward.
You'll never have to worry about being left behind because you invest in the wrong stack. That's my job. And in order to do that, the company needs to be much more nimble. Yes. Doesn't mean we don't do hard things. We don't do things to take a lot of time. We do do those little things. We just don't do have like, you know, a central planning committee whose job is to decide how many widgets we need 17 years from now. That's great. Yeah. That sounds great. You talk about having craft time.
There's arguments we made that like, you know, like people like you are like imagining hundreds of people that maybe your job is just sitting in the train, power people all day. Do you also value your personal craft time or? Yeah. Yeah. I have very, very few meetings on Wednesdays. Like today I have to have Q and this is one of them. It's right. Like I have been on craft time. Like I've built things still. I work on product. This way for most of my time doing. So. I look like I'm a manager.
So not not your managers management is important. Managers incredibly important. It's just isn't the only thing that's important. Right. Yeah. So do you imagine if I'm meeting sure of course I have meetings all the time. But what managers need to do is recognize the most important part of the job is to make sure crafters don't have to spend all their time doing things and managers should do. Yes. Yes. Yes. You've worked in big tech companies, but most big tech companies.
The largest problems they usually have is they run out of meeting rooms. There's a potential problem that big tech companies is there aren't enough meeting rooms and doesn't matter how many meeting rooms are don't enough of them. And I think that's a sign. There's something else some the emperor doesn't have that much clothing on. Yes, like you build like a fighting highland is always cars feel feel failure or something. Yeah, it's got impressive behavior.
Yeah. Do you guys have a strong writing culture or like some other best practice to not have a lot of meetings. Yeah, we have much stronger writing culture than the average company does. Really much stronger sharing culture. Like shop like a boom you said offices. You have office anymore. When you said offices. Postures all over the world that said do things tell people it was like all over the place and shop a size core. We have our own operating system for how we're on a company.
It's called GST. It's where we get shit done. That's a good idea on software. And part of it's a core thing is a written updates frequently like weekly written updates and that is much easier to do. And much better to do much easier to consume. Yeah. Then like a daily level or like some like that. Yeah, it's like a it's like a lot of decisions I've found can be just resolved through like a sync written.
And then if you go back and forth like 20 times and you can't figure it out then have a meeting. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, especially this is literally true to you. Like what you say actually is true. And the existence of a meeting is a sign of a failure of another process. It just means that like the back and forth you do they think that it works.
Let's just have a meeting. But like what you really should do is get a wider back and forth and work and make it such that goes back and forth work better in the future. You'll like to also need to have meetings. But like it's better. It's just that system works rather than like the next to the meeting is almost always signs the missing API. Just like what it is. Like the information you need to do to make a decision didn't exist. So you have a meeting to figure out what the answer was.
Most had to mean the thing you really should do is go back and fix the API. Yeah, I also need to run a retro of why does the meeting even happen? Yeah. Yeah. How do you, what if you work at the company is not Shopify? Like how do you protect your craft at time? Like can't just say no to meetings or do you have any? I don't know. I mean, I can tell you that I think it's incredibly difficult at most companies because most companies are built for managers.
It's just hard to actually tell by how buildings work. If you're an accompanying usually it tops floors reserved for managers usually like it. It's just usually how it works in most places. Like what I think the API is actually unique is Shopify's work chart is inverted. They have an inverted short chart. So the lowest level of the org chart is Toby. All right. And then yeah, that's what it goes off from Toby.
So we've been the company has been deliberate about servant leadership since it's like this is founding. So I think it's incredibly difficult man. So like my advice to people who want to spend their time building and focusing on a craft rather than sitting in meetings is this if you're very good at your job and if you value your crafts. Just go to shop.com forward slash careers. Okay. Okay. Got it. All right. I'll definitely write that down in case I might. Yeah. Okay. Just a few more questions.
Let's talk about the prior review some more right? Yeah. Like I'm just like a PM and I just like big printed to CEO. And I found that like a lot of PMs that you don't want to tell the D scene story. Oh, you know, I thought about all this everything's going extremely well. Here's just like a stas up there for you. It's like a, you may as like a total way of time. You know, it's like what do you think from the exact perspective? No, I think I think you should not have that meeting.
Like I think it's a fast. The meetings are very odd meetings. Yeah. I think like David is among the world's best CEOs. Just like it's very clear he is. I think Roblox also think about the world. And I think that's similar to similar in like as the Shopify which is like what is a more important thing. And we're both under this journey of building software to get rid of the things that traditional company have basically gone by management. And it's possible.
Yes. Because once you give like root access to your OF to like someone else you just might as well be someone else. So yeah, I think there's a real thing. I also buy a shop I alone in this are a few first I think Roblox is one of those companies that is trying. Very hard to build a new type of company that wasn't accidentally designed. Yes. So we asked the question is what we asked why very frequently about the key tenants of a business and very few people would ask why about.
Yes, they're also a real question. We asked why about gap accounting at one point. And it turns out he should use gap accounting because everyone else. So like that's like there are very few things about which that is not true. That we want to know why something happens so we don't cargo call and we don't do something just because someone else does it. Just because someone else does it is a very good reason not to do that thing.
Like yes, and this is like it would happen that most companies are the most companies adopt industry best practices. But industry best practices are frequently because they've been written down it means someone used to do long time ago. So so many people did them a long time ago someone had time to write them down. So by the time you read about it, it's probably way out of date. In fact, the people who used to them probably no longer do them.
So it's always trying to get the industry back to the way you actually are doing is lowering yourself down taking yourself back in time. So something the people who used to no longer do. And that's just like really terrible. And that's basically what most companies are not stronger let end up being right. They end up being like run by a few people who want to minimize the risk. Does they always adopt industry best practices?
Yeah, I think they nourish as companies grow just to become like a, I mean, just become like a crappier place to work. As you get bigger and bigger and you really have to fight everyday to keep the culture that you had before. So yeah, yeah, that's the best way to do that. Yeah, you have to raise your gains to machine all the time. The news I just called the creator economy right and Shopify is like one of the main aviars.
How do you plan to support creators beyond an e-commerce platform or like, you know, some big areas? I mean, look, so one of our jobs at Shopify is not to be potentially distracted like I like things. To try a very hard focus on this area we have picked, right, which is how can we help people reach for independence building companies, building specifically retail businesses? Now, it just so happens that a very good way to monetize yourself as a creator is by building a retail business, right?
Like Mr. Beast is on Shopify for a reason. Right, yeah, like it's a real thing. It's not like I'm like we have products there. We have like a product called collabs with lots of players use. We have a set of tools on a very good for creators, but I want to be able to but we're not going to do what our job isn't to do everything. Our job is to make that ideal piece of software you choose that guarantee that you have not made a mistake when you want to sell something to someone.
Right now that could be a creator that does affiliate links. Cool. We have a product for you. You can be a creator once you start your own brand. It'll apply for you. But if you're a creator who wants to create new content for VR, you should use some other pieces of software. But when it kind of sells something in VR, you should use Shopify because we will be exceptional at that.
I thought it was a good answer because usually when you ask company executives, do you have a solution for my problem? The answer every company executive always gives us. Yes, of course I do. I have a solution for every problem. But we don't have a solution for every problem. If your problem is this particular size problem that you want to sell something to someone, we're perfect. If it's not, please go use someone else.
I think that's a great answer actually. Going back to the strategy part, there's one thing about strategy. Focus on the one thing. That's not a strategy. So I think just focus on that. The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing. Exactly. I don't know which quote that is. But yeah, I don't know. Cool. All right. Thanks so much, man. Yeah. I'll do something else with you. Yeah. Cheers.