Hi, I'm Edward. Catch me on twitter at edwardog. I work at Shopify, down the street.
If you could not fail, how would you change the culture in the public service to be the best place to work at on the planet?
I am certain that all the pieces are there, but there's something in the way of ubiquitous innovation and growth in the organization.
Shopify is a company of motivated people who make the best stuff for building businesses on the internet. I'm not going to prescribe that you do everything that we do, but I encourage you to steal the parts that make sense for you.
Company culture matters to us a lot. Culture is what lets us move fast and stay healthy, growing, and innovative. If your culture is broken, it doesn't matter who you hire or how much money you've got; your staff are going to start leaving or turn poisonous.
A big part of Shopify culture is autonomy. Spoon feeding is bad. It's a waste of time and stunts personal growth. Trust staff to do what they want and how they want. It keeps people motivated and producing great work. Nobody wants to do a crappy job, so trust them to be awesome.
You need mastery when you want innovation. Give people everything they need to get better at their job: the best tools available and management that pushes staff to work on hard stuff that challenges them. People who are bored either leave or become poisonous.
Hiring is the most important thing a team can do. Screw up, and you've poisoned the company. Nail it, and everyone wins. No standardized tests. Teams to converse with candidates like humans and work on real problems together. It turns out to be a great way to identify a good fit.
Mistakes are encouraged and embraced. After significant screw ups, we hold retrospectives to determine what happened, and how to get better. Fingerprinting doesn't help, so we don't do it. If we're not making mistakes, we're probably not pushing ourselves, which is even worse.
It is possible to have an entire career in the same role. The role of a manager or facilitator at Shopify is by no way more elite than a creator and salaries reflect that. Anyone is free to transition, but it isn't necessary to advance in your career.
Most disagreements at Shopify end with “let’s run an experiment and see what the data suggests”. This idea of rapid prototyping, and throwing away the stuff that fails and keeping the good stuff is evolution. Evolution works. Google “Shopify Hack Days” later.
Transparency is a big deal at Shopify. On a regular basis, we’ll hold executive “ask me anything” sessions, where people can post anonymous questions to an internal board where others can vote those questions up or down and the execs answer the most popular ones, live, in front of the company. “What are your biggest mistakes?” “Project X was a failure; what happened there?” are considered softballs.
The Shopify lounge used to be a nightclub, which still incidentally does a really good job of creating random encounters between teams. You need cross-pollination for great work.
The overarching Shopify mantra: do things; tell people. Simple, yet hard to pull off. “My project isn't ready yet.” “I'm not sure what people will think.” No. You need feedback to do great work, so do something and get feedback.
On that note, let’s talk about the things we are still bad at. Shopify is addicted to shipping new functionality, faster code, and better ways of doing things. It sometimes lead to people overreaching in terms of how many projects they have on their plate. The value of stopping to reflect and relax after shipping some new hotness is something we’re only now realizing and making time for.
Corporate knowledge transfer is hard. We’re great at collaborating on code, but keeping 300 people on the same page and encouraging active and heated discussions is not easy. We use a ton of IM, internal chat rooms, and have been trying a wiki for documents. It’s ok? This is definitely not a nut that we have cracked.
If I can leave you with one thing today, it is this:
- be really picky about who you hire
- trust the people you do hire; Nobody wants to do a crappy job
- give them infinite autonomy with clear goals and everything they need to be awesome