How Shopify’s anti-meeting, anti-mandatory-office experiment is going
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/how-shopify-bungled-its-la...
This is PR, not journalism.
A big one is that being a smaller, super ambitious startup means that we are shipping at an incredible rate (yay). However, the fidelity of our planning has declined quite a bit because we’ve taken the time previously allotted to meetings and increased our overall throughput with it. Because of this, there’s more deviation from what was planned and designed to what was shipped and there’s less alignment across teams, so it’s harder to coordinate feature development. Overall, we’re shipping stuff that tends to churn faster, but the hope is that it’s just temporary.
Asking as an outsider, won't shipping a lot of things in this environment lead to some suboptimal product state. I'm used to coordinate > build > learn > iterate > ship; which although slows down gross feature development, tends to prevent the 60-80% of experiments that don't work from getting launched.
Does removing meetings to optimize throughput of feature development not get us into some feature factory mindset? This isn't binary btw, but I think moves thinking more towards a build mindset vs a solve problem mindset.
I’m as anti meeting as anyone, and yet Shopify’s worst decisions seem to have coincided with this anti-meeting push, and almost makes me be less militant about my anti-meeting stance.