Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Shopify Reflections: Learnings on my first Black Friday!

Itā€™s my first Thanksgiving and Black Friday at a commerce company since my time at Walmart Labs. Itā€™s always a reflective time and I found myself thinking about the initial months at Shopify. You never really know what a new place with feel like, no matter the process and time you get to spend during the recruitment period.

How has it been and what have I learned?

The developer opportunity is huge

I knew that Shopify was a rocket ship and how it was a platform for millions of merchants. What I didnā€™t fully understand before joining was the size of the developer opportunity. If you were looking to make a bet on an app ecosystem, and believe in the commerce space and helping entrepreneurs, I think the ROI is bigger diving in and building on Shopify compared to other platforms that are much more saturated and hard to get awareness on. With commerce you can find a niche that helps multiple merchants and build true win win situations. You help the merchants, and are in the critical flow of $$$.

I have been chatting with Shopify developers week on week and learning about their experiences ramping up and building to success. It is vital that we work together to improve the full developer success lifecycle:

  • Find an idea and validate it
  • Make it as easy as possible to build it fast
  • Get it in front of merchants so they can install it and now you work together to drive both of your businesses.

I am seeing small teams that build large businesses in short time frames, and large crews building a portfolio of products. There are theme developers who are able to build beautiful creations that fit the varied types of commerce, and agencies who are deep experts available to jump in to build the perfect commerce site that is individual and personal.

One experience that tells the tale occurred in my initial onboarding. One of the opportunities that everyone at Shopify gets as they start is to spend some time with merchants on the lines of support. Itā€™s a genius move as you get to learn the product and build strong empathy with merchants. This was one of the many onboarding moments that showed how Shopify respects the opportunity. We are growing fast, but thereā€™s so much room to improve.

One merchant was a coffee shop in a small town in Texas. The COVID pandemic forced them to pivot and they used Shopify to get online. At first they thought it was a way to stay in business and allow their locals to pickup their brew. But over time they started to explore options, courtesy of the app platform, and one was game changing. They installed a B2B wholesale app and started to see small bulk orders for their beans. Then the bulk orders got larger so much so that the reason they called support was to get some help with the performance of very large orders. This business transformed from a local coffee shop to becoming a global supplier.

Founders at the helm matter

I really love working at a place that still has strong founders at the helm. Tobi is incredible engaged and itā€™s so fun to see. Unlike other spots I have been in where founders got a lil distracted and often wanted to build other businesses on the side, the team here understands how early we are on the mission and show how excited they are to build a company with real longevity. I have already witnessed how fast the team can make decisions as they focus on making commerce great for everyone. This speed of purpose is refreshing.

Growth mode is just… fun

The company is still very much in hyper growth. This means that there is much more to do than you have time for, and there is huge scope for everyone.

I am spending much more time on hiring, and really excited to bring on new members to the team and building our impact together. The folks I have found at Shopify have been passionate and exceptional, and combining that with some of the best from the broader community has me incredible jazzed for what we can pull off in 2022. There is so much across the platform, tooling, education, I am chomping at the bit to deliver and constantly improve it.

I was impressed with my hiring experience, and with a flow of great people at various stages of it, Iā€™ve been incredibly happy to hear them mirror my own thoughts. The high order bit is that the process is truly focused on candidates having the chance to really show what they bring to the table. Itā€™s nice being able to wholeheartedly recommend giving us a chance and seeing if there is a fit, and not worrying that folks will have a poor experience, or get unlucky with the draw.

Web is a first class citizen

I donā€™t have to fight for execs or teams to care about the Web here. Commerce transcends all platforms of course, but there is a truly understanding of the role the Web plays strategically for all of our merchants. The importance not just of channels, and the ability to sell on others territory, but the vital role of having a direct connection with buyers and having them coming to you and your site.

You see in projects such as Hydrogen that Shopify understands the responsibility of being a great citizen with the Web, and we are doing more and more, whenever we find areas where we think our expertise can help.

I remember being in other commerce companies when the feeling was that the Web was dead and mobile native was all that mattered. It was all about the gold rush to installs. It was humbling.

Don’t just extrpolate!

I remember seeing the engagement charts, and to be honest you could see how many believed the lines would keep going and crossing. In reality, even for big brands, this wasnā€™t the case. And for smaller niches it was much different. As someone who feels the Web is quite special, itā€™s nice to work somewhere that gets it.

Serving merchants, developers, and entrepreneurs

It is much more meaningful to see the success of merchants around the world hit their goals, and surpass them. Supporting a diverse long tail of commerce hits me in the same way that it did when working on the web platform itself. I don’t want large silos that take all the winnings and have all of the power, so working on a true platform with a vibrant ecosystem is important to me.

So, a few months in, and I’m more charged than ever to help make Shopify the best platform for developers touching commerce in any way shape or form!

Developer Productivity Matters

I have been fighting for investment and focus on developer productivity for a large part of my career. Platforms often focus on the user side more, and think that the focus should be on solely economic opportunity. Understandably, if you can’t persuade a business that their effort will result in profit, you won’t get resources applied.

I can’t tell you how often I have heard a version of the following:

“Hell. Developers rushed to learn Objective-C to build iOS apps!”

ā€” Bizness Guy

The gold rush was real on getting apps available for the exploding usage on the iPhone, but while Objective-C looks weird to many from the {curly brace generation} it is actually an elegant language (sure, it has quirks, but don’t we all!). This flippant repost also ignores the quality in the UIKit foundations, and the quality of tooling.

Pete’s right!

Economics of a platform are important, and are an input into how many developers can be hired, but there are clear reasons that it is important to focus on developer productivity if you work on a platform. I contend that the vast majority of platforms are under invested in their support of developers, and haven’t reached the point of limited returns. Why?

Time is precious

A developer has a set time budget that is fixed. There are priorities coming at them from all sides. The “business” wants features, features, features. The platform is forcing deprecations, and requirements for performance, accessibility, and security.

Time well spent

If we can take away any time that is wasteful, we can optimize the time well spent of a developer. This allows for more productive output per time slot.

Another important characteristic of time well spent is that we aren’t JUST talking about pure optimization of effort. Developers want to do a good job, and are quite willing to spend time that results in higher quality experiences. We want to do a good job, and have experienced getting into the flow state to build something great. The notion that “developers are lazy” is often misinterpreted. We just don’t want to waste time, just like humans hate any form of bureaucracy that feels wasteful.

Frustration is the productivity killer

If you are frustrated, time gets exponentially eaten up. Developers are engaging in a creative pursuit, and paper cuts slow down your flow, and get you in a frame of mind that is destructive. When you are enjoying yourself, your energy levels won’t deplete in the same way as if frustrated. This is why it is vital that you track developer needs and frustrations and actively get rid of them.

If the platform is hard to use, and the tooling isn’t delightful, and the documentation sucks, well then the effect on time isn’t a set amount, but is rather a multiplier. You have the power to influence a multiplier. This is a big deal. Also, if you are particularly bad, that multiplier can go as low as zero, where the developer flips the table and does something else šŸ™‚

Developers don’t scale linearly

While the economics of a platform may allow for hiring more developers, we all know that this doesn’t scale cleanly. As a team grows, you get increased communication costs, and it takes a very special team to be able to scale. Cut out the need and allow teams to be as small as possible, and to allow a team to be able to work in parallel as best as they can.

Don’t cop out on productivity

Don’t fall for it. Don’t think that you can get away without focusing on developers and doing everything you can to keep them productive. I remember someone who told me “The business doesn’t care about developer smiles” as though I was a hippy solely looking to care about our developers (which isn’t a bad thing!). Building trust is important. Having developers who love working on your platform is valuable. But beyond that, you want the flywheel from developers to be going as fast as possible. You want them putting their effort into quality new features. You want them fresh enough to want to put effort into areas that you care about in the commons of your ecosystem (performance, privacy, security, etc).

You should be doing everything you can to maximize time well spent, and taking on as many hard problems as you can, so your ecosystem doesn’t have to.

So, yes, developer productivity matters.

New Job! Arming Developers @ Shopify

I am excited to share the news that, after a lovely summer break post-Google, I have taken a new job at Shopify. My mission focuses on helping developers succeed at delivering amazing, diverse, commerce experiences.

Why Shopify and this mission? It turns out that my career journey has set me up for this moment. I have spent a lot of time working on, and caring about:

  • Developers
  • Web and the diversity of content
  • Commerce

If you will indulge me, I will explain how the pieces have come together, and the thread of people that got me here.

The People

I had the fortune of working with Ilya Grigorik at Google for over five years. I loved working with him as we shared the same ecosystem view, and big picture on what was needed to really solve complex problems. We have learned the hard way that it isnā€™t enough to engineer yourself out of a constraint, and instead takes a lot more. 

Ilya joined Shopify at the start of the year, and I got to chatting with JML, who I must have first met in Ottawa many many years ago when the Bespin team spent time with the Eclipse team to chat about Web IDEs šŸ™‚ We had a great conversation that went all over the map, and it ended with ā€¦ ā€œSo, you seem to really like working with Ilya, how about if you could continue to do so? :)ā€

That was the birth of great chats with Duncan Davidson, Tobi, Tom Newton, and many more who showed me how much passion there was around making sure that Shopify would invest across the board in making commerce great for everyone, and really leaning into the platform and ecosystem view. I was excited about the desire to lean into the nuance, to go with gut where appropriate, and to care about taste. This has always been in the Ruby and Rails community, and is something I always appreciated when building Rails sites back in the day.

So many existing features and products announced at #ShopifyUnite!

This really came through at the Shopify Unite event, where I saw developers excited about so many of the changes that were announced and in the pipe, and how things that I find important, were being tackled.

Great developer docs are a critical part of the developer experience

I have learned that step one on a journey is really listening to developers, feeling their pain, and doing everything to take on any of their burden and fix it.

But, it isnā€™t enough to listen and act, step two revolves around shining a light on the future. A platform needs to paint this exciting future, and make it clear how they will be enabling itā€¦ bringing developers along for the opportunity.

Commerce and the Web

When I look back, I have spent the majority of my energy on the developer experience and tools, the Web, and commerce. I remember building a student book exchange website when I first came to college in the US. I couldnā€™t believe the prices of books here, and many of which were only useful for 10 weeks, so why not recycle them? This is one end of the entrepreneurial spirit that Shopify serves so well.

After college, I got to work on Vitamins.com. Tom Malaher was an amazing lead engineer there, and he taught me the beauty of a finite state machine (David K would be proud!), and how it enabled us to make so many fast changes in a dynamic cart and checkout environment. It also took me from Perl to Javaā€¦ and started my time with Enterprise JavaBeans and TheServerSide.com!

And more recently, I worked at Walmart Labs, focused on the front endā€¦ starting with mobile with their native apps and mWeb sites, and ending with desktop as well as we merged the streams. This humbled me at the impact of commerce in peoples lives. I remember being at a Walmart store just before midnight, testing some in store product integrations. I noticed that there were a large number of women with full carts, and young children. This late at night? It turned out that it was the end of the month, and a new month meant access to food stamps, and they were waiting to get the most value they can for their family. I went on to see so many examples of the broad role that commerce plays in peoples lives.

At Walmart scale, I got to learn about the effects of performance on the experience for customers and the bottom line for the merchant. I remember reading studies that showed simple statistics with claims such as: ā€œIf your response speeds up by Xms, it will result in Y conversion upliftā€. This hides so much detail of course. The flow of commerce isnā€™t linear at all. When a customer first clicks on a link from a Google Search result and it loads slow, they will likely abandon and go back to click on another linkā€¦ or open Amazon. On the other hand, if they have a bunch of items ready to check out, the bar for abandonment is a lil lower. Itā€™s not that performance doesnā€™t matter, or that it doesnā€™t have an affect, itā€™s just different. The notion of ā€œcommerce performanceā€ is different to generic performance, and I think there is a lot we can do here to optimize the experience and help developers hit the right bars. about:blank is very fast, but doesnā€™t offer much. I want commerce to feel amazing, and performance contributes to this, but it isnā€™t everything.

I have been talking about how the Web is a general purpose platform, and how we should consider spending time on verticals and making sure the Web has everything needed to do a great job there. Commerce is a key vertical, and is interesting to me as it touches on the Web, because:

  • It is a massive driver of usage and growth on the Web (notice itā€™s effect in earnings calls as of late!)
  • It isnā€™t just content, and yet isnā€™t a full on productivity app experienceā€¦. it fits in the spectrum in between, an area that the Web can be really great at
  • Commerce journeys can naturally compete with silos. Composition, and the flow as you browser to multiple sites, can make commerce particularly good as a multi-merchant experience

This all comes together for me in how the Web and Shopify allow you to not just rent space, but also own your destiny. Have your own property and build relationships with your customers, much needed for LTV. Also use the variety of sales channels that get your goods in front of customers and draw them in with the potential of becoming loyal.

This is why I am at Shopify. I am excited to help deliver the best possible developer experience, starting with an amazing platform, and working with the entire ecosystem.

If you are a Shopify Developer, I want to hear from you, and understand anything that we can do to be more helpful.

If you are a developer that hasnā€™t looked at Shopify yet, Iā€™m guessing that you will have some need for something on the commerce spectrum, and I would love to get any feedback.

And finally, Shopify is growing fast. If you are interested in the mission, and if you are interested in working with great people to dive deep into delivering amazing developer experiences through platform work, tooling, integrations, ecosystem work, or education, I want to hear from you. We will be growing our product, engineering, developer advocacy, and writing teams. Please reach out!

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.