Throwing curveballs: Shopify’s secret for staying ahead of the game
By shaking up business as usual, managers encourage their teams to think bigger.
Every company wants to invent The Next Big Thing. Few companies have the vision and tools to do so. At Shopify, teams are encouraged to favor big swings over incremental improvements—efforts that have led to everything from the company’s groundbreaking e-commerce platform to its reimagination of corporate meetings. “We’re very lucky to have executives that want interesting and new ideas,” says Katarina Batina, UX Director, Shop at Shopify. “They are not interested in how [another company] does something; they want uniquely fitted solutions for our customers. That bar forces us to think about how we do things differently.”
Doing things differently causes friction, but the path of least resistance rarely results in anything new. Here, Shopify reveals how questioning set processes in brainstorming, planning, and meeting has catapulted the company into the future.
Ditch the doc
The start of a product roadmap differs from one team to the next, but a conventional method might look something like this: You open a document, jot down some questions about the problem you’re trying to solve, and pass it along to your colleagues for feedback.
According to Katarina, this approach is more about indulging a habit than making headway. Sure, it might generate a decent solution, but what if you’re missing the bigger picture? Worse, what if you’re asking questions that don’t need to be answered in the first place? A docs-based framework is inherently limiting. “When I open your doc and it says your vision is ‘creating an amazing tool for buyers to shop omnichannel surfaces,’ I don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve and what the opportunities are,” she says. “You lose all of the creativity that is expected to come up with really unique ideas.”
Use this FigJam template to bring your team’s reflections, strategy, goals, and product roadmap into one place.
“What’s great about tools like [FigJam] and not always starting with a doc is it breaks your brain a little bit,” she says. “When you break your brain before solving a hard problem, it means you're likely to have a new perspective on that thing. It might actually have more creative solutions.” With the guidance of a FigJam template, product managers are more explicit about metrics, key problems, proposed solutions, guiding principles, key assumptions, and dependencies—and teams are freed to respond less linearly.
Plan how you plan
While some templates can break processes that aren’t working, others can introduce process where one was lacking. For the first time this year, Katarina and her colleagues used a FigJam template to help guide an annual in-person planning session.
“Because we’re so remote, we sometimes struggle to figure out what we should do when we get together,” she says. By filling out the template before everyone gathered IRL, they created an at-a-glance baseline for group discussion. Then they updated the template in real time as they hashed out their plans, using FigJam to seamlessly document major strategic decisions—eliminating the need to take photos of a mess of sticky notes.
“We were on our laptops, but we were together, having that in-person discussion,” she says. “It was hands-down the best planning session we have ever done.”
Democratize the discussion
How you make decisions matters as much as the decisions themselves. “Design is the form factor for where strategic product decisions are discussed, and Figma is that tool for us,” says Katarina. “Rarely is it desired that those are getting hashed out in Google Docs or other written tools. Figma truly is the love language of decision-making.”
Relying on visual language also democratizes the process of generating new ideas. In this way, it is a crucial asset for any company that wants to nurture talent in all its forms, not just those with powers of description. “We're not just design-driven,” says Sebastian Speier, a Senior UX Manager. “We're trying to develop a strong forward-leaning vision. And when you're just working with words, it's very hard to do that unless you are very good with words.”
Figma truly is the love language of decision-making.
Use this simple brainstorming template to help your teammates organize and visualize their thoughts.
Especially in larger meetings where 20 people are collaborating at once, he continues, “you can’t make the assumption that everyone has the capacity to paint their vision in a doc. That's a tall order. It’s a lot easier to come together in a tool that has other ways of painting that vision.” Something as basic as dropping a link to a project or inserting a snapshot of it instead of relying on words can be a fast and powerful way to articulate an idea that’s more inclusive.
When in doubt, sketch it out
Of course, new ideas don’t just magically appear fully formed. They stretch and morph and shapeshift as your team works through their optimal dimensions. This poses a challenge: How do you bring clarity to an ever-shifting vision?
Katarina has an ingenious solution. She has a scratch Figma file open any time she’s in a strategic leadership meeting. As they’re talking, she draws, shoves the sketch in a chat, and says, “Is this what you’re talking about?”
“Suddenly everybody's, like, ‘Absolutely,’ or, ‘Oh my God, no,’ or half the room splits immediately and it cost you nothing,” she says. “You’re in control of the conversation. You're saying, ‘Hm, what did you mean then?’ and starting to get the shape of the thing.”
From there, she’s able to gather everyone around the idea quickly. After all, it’s much easier to get buy-in from colleagues and senior leaders—not to mention customers—when they can see exactly what they’re buying. It’s just a simple matter of trying something new.
Suzanne LaBarre is a journalist and content strategist specializing in design, technology, business, and innovation. She has overseen Fast Company’s Co.Design and was the online content director of Popular Science.
