Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Brandon Chu on building product at Shopify, how writing changed the trajectory of his career, the habits that make you a great PM, pros and cons of being a platform PM, how Shopify got through Covid

June 27, 2022

AI Summary

5 min read

Brandon Chu, SVP of Product at Shopify, shares his framework for product management, emphasizing writing as a career accelerator, daily habits for PM effectiveness, tradeoffs in platform roles, and Shopify's operational response to Covid.

Writing as a career lever

Chu credits public writing with shifting his trajectory from operations to product leadership. Starting with LinkedIn posts on Shopify's inner workings, he gained visibility that led to internal promotions and external opportunities. Writing forced clarity on complex ideas, built a personal brand, and surfaced feedback loops, making it a repeatable habit over networking.

Habits distinguishing top PMs

Effective PMs, per Chu, maintain three habits: deep customer immersion via weekly store visits and merchant calls; structured writing to align teams (e.g., weekly memos over meetings); and "shipping small" to test assumptions quickly. He stresses avoiding over-reliance on data early, favoring qualitative insights first, and treating PM work as hypothesis-driven experimentation rather than feature delivery.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Episode Intro and Brandon's Background**
2 (04:45) **Writing's Impact on Career Trajectory**
3 (12:30) **Habits of Great Product Managers**
4 (23:15) **Pros and Cons of Platform PM vs. Consumer PM**
5 (34:20) **Building Product at Shopify: Strategy and Execution**
6 (45:10) **Navigating Covid at Shopify**
7 (56:40) **Future Bets and Closing Advice**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Brandon Chu is VP of Product at Shopify, where he leads the app platform ecosystem, new initiatives group, and M&A investments. Brandon helped scale Shopify’s PM team from five to hundreds, and worked his way up from an IC Senior PM. Prior to Shopify, he was a Director of PM at FreshBooks and, before that, a founder. Brandon might be best known for his writing on the art and science of product management as part of a collection on Medium he calls “The Black Box of Product Management.”

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Thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Stytch: https://stytch.com/

• Persona: https://withpersona.com/lenny

• PostHog: https://posthog.com/lenny

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In this episode, we cover:

1) Brandon’s path to VP of Product at Shopify.

2) What has Brandon found to be the most important skill set for super-successful PMs?

3) What is it like to build product at Shopify?

4) How did Shopify adjust after the shock to e-commerce during Covid?

5) How did Shopify build a one-click team offsite flight/hotel/activity booking platform?

6) How did Brandon motivate himself to start, and keep, writing?

7) As a PM, why is writing one of the highest-ROI uses of your time?

8) What’s Brandon’s favorite piece of writing?

9) What are the biggest surprises, pros, and cons about being a platform PM?

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Where to find Brandon:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandonmchu

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonmchu/

• Brandon’s writing: https://blackboxofpm.com/

• Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager: https://blackboxofpm.com/making-good-decisions-as-a-product-manager-c66ddacc9e2b

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