We track Product so you don't have to. Top Podcasts summarised, the latest AI tools, plus research and news in a 5 min digest.

Hey Product fans!

Welcome to this week’s 🌮 Product Tapas.

If you’ve been forwarded this or just fancy the best reading (and listening!) experience, check out the mobile app or web version. You can sign up and check previous editions here.

Before we dig in… on Monday 18th, Product Tapas is 1 yr old 🎂. Wow, time flies.

When I started this newsletter last November I didn’t really know where it would take me, or whether I would give up after a few tries. But I did think there was a place out there to curate and share the best of what I was finding in the Product world, from news, time-saving tools and Podcasts. All in a bite-sized shareable format.

Over the last year I’ve created 73 editions, featured c300 time saving tools, written over 60 Pod Shots podcast summaries (saving over 3000 hours of listening time for readers😲) and featured countless great product articles.

The original idea remains intact, but it has developed and features have been changed.

We’ve tried listenable versions, added an app version, you can “chat” to the podcasts to ask them questions and now you can access a database of the Pod Shots and Time-Saving tools to help keep making it useful.

More importantly, I love creating it and it seems to have resonated with the 723 of you that subscribe and open it on a regular basis (i.e. 3 + wks/month).
 
There’s plenty more planned for the year ahead, and I'd love to hear what you like the most (or don’t like) by clicking on one of the options below.

Plus as it’s our birthday I’d LOVE It if you could forward this to just 1 person you think would like it. It would be AMAZING to finish the year with a boost in subs to take us over that magic 1,000.

Crikey - that’s a long intro. On with the newsletter.

Well, nearly.

As it’s our birthday, I've been playing with NotebookLLM as a way to try to create a sort of audio version of the newsletter so you can listen when on the move. So if you want to listen rather than read, check it out here.

It’s a bit of a test so again tell me if you it.

What’s on the menu this week? 🧑‍🍳

📰 Not Boring – Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is building her new team, Apple’s latest vision includes an AI-powered wall tablet, and TikTok is doubling down on social integration amid looming restrictions. Plus, Amazon’s got plans to break from Nvidia, and ChatGPT’s user base might just be catching up to Google Chrome.

⌚ Time-Saving Tools & GPTs – We’re spotlighting a lineup of tools that make the daily grind a little lighter: from text-style video editing to an AI to-do list co-pilot, free e-signatures for all, to an automated insights tool and more; there’s something here for every part of your workflow.

🍔 Blog Bites – In this week’s must-reads for product teams, Ben Evans dives into the new US administration’s impact on tech, while Tim Herbig offers advice on making product strategy stick with measurable metrics. Plus, for those looking to combine PLG with traditional sales, check out Vincent Jong’s latest on Product-Led Sales.

🎙️ Pod Shots – Shopify’s Archie Abrams recently joined Lenny’s podcast to break down Shopify’s bold growth strategies. Learn why they don’t do KPIs, optimise FOR churn, and set a 100-year vision for their product teams— plenty of unconventional takes on long held product norms!

Grab a brew, let’s dig in! 🚀

📰 Not boring

• OpenAI corner:

  • Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati’s new team takes shape, unsurprisingly taking some from her previous team

  • Although in brighter OpenAI people news, co-founder Greg Brockman returns

  • Also, ChatGPT monthly usage may now rival Google Chrome

  • The agents are coming… OpenAI nears launch of AI Agent tool to automate tasks for users

• On search:

  • New Google app conversational search demo airs on Twitter. It continuously listens to your voice where you can ask followup questions while performing a search

  • Whilst Perplexity confirms its experimenting with advertising

• Apple news:

  • Apple’s next device is an AI wall tablet for home control, Siri and video calls. Targeting March for release

  • Apple is also showing some love to Android users by finally letting green bubbles send message reactions

  • Apple has started rolling out its Intelligence features, with highly amusing results

• Other social:

  • TikTok launches integration with Lemon8 (ByteDance’s newer social app), as US ban looms

  • WhilstYouTube tests adding TikTok’s swipe-up gesture to full-length videos

  • Google's Vids AI video maker is rolling out to most Workspace tiers (Vids uses Gemini AI model to create videos based on suggestions and document files)

  • Instagram finally ends the most annoying side of its content feed; it’ll no longer auto-refresh when you open it, unless you scroll down 🙌 

• New startup Tessl launches, with a coding agent aimed at Product teams

• Amazon ready to use its own AI chips, and reduce its dependence on Nvidia

• Plus, Amazon debuts discount store with everything under $20 to take on Temu and Shein

• Data

  • Gen-Z (the mobile 1st gen) now make up c40% all mobile users. Unsurprisingly, Temu, Shein and TikTok top the charts (13-17yrs old)

  • Global AI use at work rose from 32% to 48%, but Slack found 48% workers uncomfortable telling managers they use AI at work

  • TitkTok maintains solid H1-revenue growth despite U.S. ban threat (+60% to c$17bn)

• LG has a stretchable display that can expand by 50 percent. This is mad.

 Want even more news?? View more here →

⌚️ Time-Saving Tools & GPTs

• Choppity: Edit videos like you would a text document. Select parts of the transcript and describe what to do

• PathPilot: The AI model that understands recorded customer journeys; generate detailed user journey narratives and summaries from session replays

• Agree: Free e-signature for all. Plus automated invoicing and integrated payments which seems kinda interesting…

• Sona: captures your conversations and provides insights that matter most to you

• Focus Buddy: AI co-pilot to manage your to-do list, help avoid procrastination, and find the behavioural patterns that are holding you back

• RivalSense: Monitor any company with AI. Receive weekly curated updates

Remember, as a subscriber you can access the full time saving tools database for fast approaching 300 time-saving tools relevant for product managers and founders 🔥. Check the link below to access 👇️ .

🍔 Blog Bites - Essential Reads for Product Teams

Macro: A New President

Ben Evans always has a brilliant take on the tech news. Recently, he wrote a piece on how Trump ‘take 2’ could impact the tech landscape.

He argues that with a new US president, the tech world is bracing for significant shifts in policy, uncertainty, and potential disruption. There’s been a wave of speculation, particularly from Silicon Valley insiders who hope for fewer barriers to growth, increased support for startups, and a pro-business stance. However, with a president known for unpredictability, it’s challenging to forecast specific tech policies. Full article here.

Strategy: How to Know if Your Product Strategy Has Worked

People always seem to struggle with some of the practical sides of strategic implementation. In this recent article, Tim Herbig outlines how his thoughts on how to measure the success of a product strategy by ensuring it's both executable and measurable.

It emphasises the importance of translating strategic choices into specific, future-focused metrics that indicate real progress. Avoid generic metrics and focus on key performance indicators that reflect the strategy's impact. The article provides examples of proactive metrics for measuring success and offers practical advice on implementing strategy in a way that teams can easily adopt.

Worth a look to see if it resonates.

Product-Led Sales

Vincent Jong’s Product-Led Sales book (free ebook here) introduces a strategy that merges Product-Led Growth (PLG) and traditional sales to leverage the best of both approaches. This combined approach, known as Product-Led Sales (PLS), emphasizes using the product itself to drive growth, supplemented by targeted sales interventions. The core idea: PLG and sales don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

🎙️ Pod Shots - Bitesized Podcast Summaries

Remember, subscribers get access to an ever growing database of all the top Podcast summaries we’ve ever created. Check it out below 👇️ 

🤔 Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimises for churn, prioritises intuition, and builds toward a 100-year vision

It’s been a while but we’re back with another from Lenny; covering the recent Podcast with Archie Abrams - VP Product at Shopify. He talks how they’ve flipped the script on traditional growth metrics and operate with a 100-year vision in mind 👀. Led by unconventional strategies like effectively banning KPIs, embracing churn, and prioritising intuition, Shopify’s approach is both interesting and completely different to the conventional status quo. Dig in to find out some of the core principles driving Shopify’s success and whether they could be something you can apply.

🎥Watch the full episode here

📆 Published: November 8th, 2024

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 4 mins. Time saved: 73 mins🔥

📈 Ditching KPIs for a 100-Year Vision

Archie talks how Shopify is one of the few companies actively building with a 100-year vision. Rather than being tied to KPIs or quarterly goals, Shopify’s core product teams operate with long-term conviction and a focus on quality. This approach stems from CEO Tobi Lütke’s leadership style, which emphasises product longevity over immediate numbers. By banning KPIs, Shopify creates a culture where teams focus on delivering quality features that can evolve and adapt over time.

In Product we’ve all learned that KPIs drive everything, from resource allocation to product launches. But at Shopify, intuition, taste, and long-term value have become the guiding forces. While Shopify’s growth teams do monitor short-term metrics for experimentation, they ultimately aim to build products with the future in mind—products that may still be relevant and valuable a century from now.

Key Takeaways:

• Encourage your teams to think about your product’s long-term impact instead of solely focusing on short-term growth metrics.

• Base decisions on conviction, intuition, and alignment with the company’s ultimate vision.

• Find balance by having some teams focus on shorter-term wins and others on the long-term vision.

🚀 Optimising for Churn: A Counterintuitive Growth Strategy

In most businesses, high churn is a red flag. But Shopify views churn differently. Instead of fearing customer churn, Shopify embraces it. The reasoning? By lowering entry barriers for new users, they enable more people to try their hand at e-commerce and entrepreneurship—even if many don’t stick around long-term.

Shopify’s core mission is to make starting an online business accessible to everyone, understanding that many entrepreneurs fail on their first attempt. By focusing on the quantity of new entrepreneurs entering the platform, Shopify banks on a small subset becoming highly successful and generating significant returns. Essentially, Shopify doesn’t need every new merchant to succeed—just a few big wins in each cohort justify the overall approach.

Key Takeaways:

• Lower entry barriers to encourage more users to try your product, even if they’re not all long-term customers.

• Accept that high churn isn’t always a bad thing; it can help refine your user profile and help identify the most valuable customers.

• Consider your core mission and whether retaining every customer is necessary or if you can focus on nurturing top performers.

🔍 Long-Term Experiments: Measuring Impact Over Years, Not Months

Experimentation is a powerful tool for growth, but Shopify takes it a step further. They run long-term holdout experiments, assessing the impact of changes on user behaviour over one, two, or even three years. This approach lets Shopify observe if an experiment delivers sustainable growth rather than just a short-term lift.

Instead of making quick changes based on immediate results, Shopify’s teams wait to see how an experiment influences the total revenue and gross merchandise volume (GMV) over time. This patient, long-term view has helped Shopify focus on changes that add lasting value rather than optimising for short-term gains that might fade.

Key Takeaways:

• If feasible, run longer-term experiments to capture the true impact of product changes.

• Avoid relying solely on short-term metrics and consider the downstream effects on user lifetime value.

• Encourage teams to evaluate success based on absolute numbers and overall growth, rather than just immediate conversions.

🛠 Breaking Down Metrics: Absolute Numbers vs. Conversion Rates

Conversion rates often drive decisions in growth and product teams. However, Shopify takes a different route, focusing on total absolute numbers rather than conversion percentages. Instead of obsessing over each stage of the funnel, Shopify encourages teams to think about the entire journey and the total number of users who complete it.

This approach prevents teams from creating friction in earlier steps to make their own conversion rates look better. Instead, they focus on the bigger picture—bringing as many users as possible through the journey. By shifting from percentages to total users, Shopify ensures that each team contributes to holistic growth rather than isolated optimisations.

Key Takeaways:

• Challenge teams to consider absolute impact rather than optimising individual conversion rates.

• Incentivise teams to focus on the total journey and end goals, rather than just one part of the funnel.

• Redefine what “success” looks like by focusing on volume and total impact over incremental percentage improvements.

🧠 Intuition as a Core Driver: The Power of ‘Taste’ in Product Decisions

One of the most interesting elements of Shopify’s culture is its emphasis on taste and intuition. At Shopify, product decisions are often based on what feels right rather than on purely data-driven conclusions. Taste, or a shared sense of what quality looks like, has become a vital part of the decision-making process.

Instead of assigning KPIs to each feature, Shopify trusts its teams to design products that are simply “right.” While data is a tool, it’s not the only one; subjective judgment plays a huge role. This creates a culture where product leaders focus on quality and user experience, knowing they have the freedom to make judgment calls that support long-term brand equity.

Key Takeaways:

• Develop a strong culture around quality and intuition to foster a unique sense of taste in product design.

• Empower your teams to make decisions based on their expertise and understanding of the product vision.

• Handle subjectivity by fostering open, constructive discussions that refine the shared vision of quality.

⚙️ Hybrid Journeys and Non-Traditional Sales Motions

Traditionally, companies have clear paths: users either opt for self-service or go through sales. But Shopify blends these experiences, offering “hybrid journeys” that allow customers to switch between sales and self-service based on their needs. For example, a user can start with self-service and later get assistance from sales without starting over.

Creating this seamless flow between self-service and sales presents measurement challenges. It requires creative thinking around metrics and attribution. Shopify’s focus remains on user experience over forcing customers into rigid paths, trusting that these hybrid journeys ultimately increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Key Takeaways:

• Think about whether you could offer multiple paths for users to interact with your product, based on their preferences and needs.

• Challenge the traditional view of separating self-service from sales; consider hybrid models to better serve users.

• Adjust your metrics and measurement methods to account for hybrid journeys, ensuring you capture the full user experience.

🏗 Creating a Cohesive Growth Team Structure

Shopify’s growth team is structured into three pillars: Growth Product, Enablement, and Customer Support. Each pillar addresses a specific part of the customer journey, with Growth Product focusing on acquisition, Enablement providing internal tools, and Customer Support enhancing the user experience.

This cohesive team structure, aligned with Shopify’s unique metrics and goals, ensures that each part of the growth team has a clear mandate. By centralising customer support under growth, Shopify underscores its commitment to nurturing every merchant through their journey, from startup to success.

Key Takeaways:

• Organise growth teams around the most impactful parts of the customer journey.

• Empower growth teams with support functions like internal tooling and customer support to enable faster, more effective outcomes.

• Encourage collaboration between product and growth to ensure a cohesive user experience.

🌍 A Final Thought: Building for the Next Century

Shopify’s approach to growth may be somewhat against many of the standard norms, but it’s precisely this uniqueness that has helped them thrive. By prioritising long-term impact over short-term wins, relying on intuition, and creating an innovative team structure, Shopify demonstrates that there is more than one path to sustained growth.

This approach may not work for all. As all success stories do it no doubt requires some great talent too. But I really like the case-study as it presents an opportunity challenge how we think about the “right” way to do things, and rethink growth not as a sprint, but as a marathon. Food for thought!

Want to know more quickly? Just ask the episode below [web only]👇️🤯
or if you prefer, 🎥Watch the full episode here

📅Timestamps:

• 00:00:00 - Introduction to Funnel Optimisation

• 00:02:35 - Guest Introduction: Archie Abrams

• 00:03:09 - Shopify's Scale and Impact

• 00:06:23 - Churn and Retention Philosophy

• 00:08:12 - Lowering Barriers for Entrepreneurs

• 00:09:44 - Cost Dynamics of Customer Acquisition

• 00:10:18 - Measuring Success Beyond Retention

• 00:11:26 - Long-Term Experimentation Insights

• 00:12:40 - Different Time Horizons in Product Groups

• 00:13:12 - Long-Term Monitoring of Experiments

• 00:14:36 - Surprising Experiment Outcomes

• 00:16:22 - Monetary Friction Explained

• 00:18:14 - Impact of Onboarding on Retention

• 00:20:27 - Running Long-Term Holdout Experiments

• 00:22:44 - Metrics for Measuring Impact

• 00:23:07 - Examples of Successful Experiments

• 00:25:07 - Importance of Personalization in Onboarding

• 00:26:36 - Incentives and Team Dynamics

• 00:27:29 - Growth Team Structure at Shopify

• 00:29:59 - Goals and Metrics for Growth Teams

• 00:32:29 - Customer Support's Role in Growth

• 00:33:19 - Measuring Incremental Value

• 00:35:01 - Shipping Neutral Experiments

• 00:36:01 - Aim Heavy Philosophy

• 00:38:01 - Long-Term Thinking in Decision Making

• 00:40:24 - Technical Architecture's Importance

• 00:46:54 - Conclusion and Key Takeaways

That’s a wrap.

As always, the journey doesn't end here!

Please share and let us know what you would like to see more or less of so we can continue to improve your Product Tapas. 🚀👋

Alastair 🍽️.