Being at Shopify is by far the best thing that happened to me this year 🌠. It’s a whole new environment filled with talent, empathy, trust, willingness to change, and everyone helping each other to succeed in what they do best. As a gigantic organization spanning around the world, it feels like so much is happening it’s impossible to track, but at the same time there’s a really strong alignment and context is everywhere (Github, documentations, podcast, townhalls, slack, discourse, data portals, Gdocs, ..) which I think is where the magic of collaboration and new ideas happen, and despite the challenges of remote work we thrive.
Some things I learned and love: - There’s never a perfect solution: Weigh in the costs. Prefer simple solutions that lets you move faster. Always question the impact of a change (look into the data) - this tells you which solution is worth doing? ⚖️ - Being opinionated: Speak up if things are not ok. Lookout and experiment 🔎. - People will unblock/speed you up: There’s rarely a time where I didn’t know what to do / who to ask. There’s so much expertise within and across teams 🤝. - Asking the right question to the right people involved. Lots of perspective, insights, helps you connect the dots, and gives you better context to make decision 💬. - Make a call, do things fast, tell people, change direction if needed. You don’t always have to wait and reach consensus before making decisions. Use your best judgement 👨🏻⚖️. - Writing updates. A lot of it. This puts context into the world and helps to get eyes on it 🎙.
My growth trajectory - The many times I had to write updates, pull in different people, debug an issue, helped me learn to organize my thoughts and communicating them better when faced with many moving parts. - Being provided with the autonomy and trust to make good decisions, was daunting at first, but I think that helped me grow more confident in decision making, proposing solutions, and trying to gather thoughts, feedback and help from the right people.
There’s a lot to improve but having that noticeable trajectory was super valuable to me. Hopefully I’m in the right direction for better communication such as for collaboration, engagement in discussions, running sessions, broadcasting context to others, synthesizing thoughts clearly, and dealing with more complexities in the future.
I wouldn’t have grown as much as I did if not for my mentors and the environment of the team. Super previleged to be placed in a team that’s moving fast and solving a super interesting and impactful problem ⚡️ - to capture bad actors using our platform/services but keeping commerce better, more trustable, and easy for everyone else. Like all complex problems, there’s no right answer, it’s all tradeoff, playing with changing policies, and building the system to support a huge overload of signals, escalating/prioritizing cases, etc. Coming out of bed every morning has always been a mix of excitement, unease, thrill, and ready to be amazed at new wins made by everyone everyday. I was always kept fairly out of my comfort zone but doing the things that I love with really great people.
For now I’m taking 4 months off before coming back as a fulltime 🙌🏻. Will take my time to cooldown, reunite with my family. This was long overdue, and perhaps revisiting the past will bring out lots of nostalgia and surprises to how things has become after 2 long years. Time to sit, touch grass, and absorb the warm equatorial atmosphere of the holiday season, like a growing plant would. Relaxed enough, before I’m ready to push boundaries again.
Cheers to an awesome year 🍹.