Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision | Archie Abrams (VP Product, Head of Growth at Shopify)

In this podcast, Archie Abrams, Shopify's VP of Product and Head of Growth, shares insights into the company's distinctive growth strategies. Unlike many SaaS companies that emphasize customer retention, Shopify aims to reduce barriers for new merchants, accepting a higher churn rate to attract a larger pool of potential high-value customers. They conduct long-term holdout experiments, tracking the effects of changes over years rather than weeks, which often reveals that short-term gains may not be as significant as they first appear. Shopify's structure separates its core product vision—shaped by taste and intuition with a 100-year outlook—from its growth strategy, which prioritizes absolute numbers over rates. This creates a dynamic tension that fuels innovation. Key takeaways include the value of long-term thinking, the importance of focusing on absolute numbers, and the need to carefully evaluate monetary friction and onboarding experiences.