Archie Abrams
VP of Product & Head of Growth @ Shopify
Leads 600+ person growth org at Shopify across product, design, engineering, data, ops, and marketing.
“Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, prioritizes intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision, covering measurement and analysis, growth systems, and product design.”
Career History
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Episodes (1)
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Quotable Clips
“The way we think about churn is really going back to Shopify as a kind of our mission and what we want to do, which is to increase the amount of entrepreneurship on the internet. And so as a business,...”
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)
“Correct. And that's really a different insight than most SaaS companies that they get a customer, they really never want that person to leave. And we want to lower that barriers to get started and be ...”
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)
“Yes, tried and haven't been very successful. When you can think of the other parallel is in angel investing, right? Most of angel investments are not going to work out, but the couple that do make tha...”
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)
“Again, going back to investing, same thing there. Each vintage from a fund, how much did that return as a fund? And it's really driven by the few really successful outliers.”
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)
“And then from a metrics standpoint, we do have obviously some leading indicators in growth that we're looking at on a given experiment or what have you. But the key in what we try to instrument in our...”
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)
“And so I think it actually trains, a lot of us in growth are looking at these short-term metrics. A lot of the time it's actually more pull-forward effect, than you fully realize or an incremental use...”
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)
“And so typically when you can lower the barriers to monetary friction in some form, that could be all sorts of monetary friction early. The common belief is that we'll usually get lower quality folks ...”
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)
“Yeah, it's in the 30 to 40% range.”
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)
“Yes. Unfortunately, I think that's brutal. Probably more common than we like to believe.”
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)
“There are some cases of that, but it's rarely... I've seen neutral be positive, but I haven't seen negative.”
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)
“There's a few GMV, obviously gross profit. But GMV is kind of like a key determinant of long-term success.”
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)
“GMV over time, which correlates better. And there's a retention in profit. And then really the absolute number of merchants who are on the platform and then reaching certain GMV.”
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)