Shopify: Scale & Internal Marketing

What were the core challenges you faced, when you scale such a rapid organization like that, from under 1,000 to 4,000 or 5,000 people?

Especially for the area that I worked in, there’s a lot of education and, I guess you might call it, internal marketing of why we are doing something. You can’t just put it out there; you’ve got to explain why you are putting it out there and why it might be a good thing. Even the way you talk about things, the way you write about things, the language that you use, is really important. The days of just deploying something and saying, here it is, you just can’t do that anymore. Perhaps you can, but it’s not necessarily going to go well. Going back to talking about process and so forth, as I said early on, there’s a natural tendency, especially in a small organization that’s growing, to reject any kind of thing that people think is going to slow them down, which is a totally understandable reaction.

If you truly believe that it’s a good thing for the organization and it’s actually going to speed things up, then you have to really explain why and you have to show why. You have to show, we’ve actually tried it, we’ve experimented with it and people found benefits from doing it. The amount of time that you have to spend doing that is always more than you might think. Even though you’re just building stuff internally – you’re building infrastructure, you’re building tools and ways of working, internally – it’s not that different from if you’re having to sell outside of an organization.

It’s almost as if, the larger you get, the more you have to sell, internally, to what you do, how you think and why you’re doing things?

Yes. Decades ago, it wasn’t like that. People would always just try to slam it down everyone’s throats and it just doesn’t really work so well, nowadays.