Balancing innovation and product development

While reading The Shopify Story by Larry MacDonald, I came across an interesting snippet about product development and the need to strike a balance between innovation (in terms of rolling out new tech) and the velocity needed to roll out products. During this time, Shopify was aiming to become a mobile-first company because usage rates for smartphones and tablets were soaring in the years after the introduction of the iPhone and other brands.

Key to note for the software engineers and product managers, the pursuit of technical perfection can sometimes come at the cost of market opportunity and business growth.

Excerpts:

It was a critical challenge that was assigned to the assembled group of programmers and product managers. As the work progressed, there were some false starts and revisions, such as switching to different programming languages and redoing the work of previous months.

Miller, still CMO at the time, was becoming uneasy with the company’s response to Lütke’s call to arms. While a lot of good groundwork was getting done, it was beginning to look like the finished product was going to come too late to keep up with rival platforms. Miller then approached Lütke and said he and Shopify’s director of product, Christopher Lobay, wanted to create a team to “start solving these problems and change the direction in the company.” Lütke agreed with their proposal.

Here’s what I learnt from the excerpt above:

• Product and development should set hard deadlines on paper.
• Stream line tasks (Think, What do we need to do to go from no product to one that can be used by customers?)
• No changing tech. Go all in.
• Rewrites or porting to another language will still have the associated challenges. In turn, you end up solving the same problems twice.
• Progress first, perfection later.