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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

By the time you read this email, I will be somewhere around 2/3s of the way through my multiday hike (or ‘tramp’ as they call it over here) of New Zealand’s Abel Tasman Track. With that in mind, I don’t have too much to share housekeeping-wise. So, I share with you an image of my partner and me after we played mini golf last week.

We drew the match, believe it or not, but I hit the only hole-in-one. She is incredibly competitive and reads those emails, so she will hate me for rubbing that in. But I did. Hole in one, babayyyy. Anyway, enjoy today’s piece with one of the engineering leaders at Shopify, Farhan Thawar. Cheers!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Farhan Thawar, VP & Head of Engineering at Shopify

Farhan Thawar is the Vice President & Head of Engineering at Shopify, where he leads a team of over 3,000 engineers. He joined Shopify in 2019 through the acquisition of Helpful.com, a company he co-founded. Before that, he held leadership roles at Pivotal Labs, Xtreme Labs (acquired by Pivotal), Microsoft, and Trilogy.

He holds a degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and an MBA in Financial Engineering from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School. Farhan is also active as a board member and startup advisor, particularly within the Canadian tech and Y Combinator ecosystems.

What did you learn from being acquired by Shopify?

I've been lucky. This is actually my second acquisition. What I’ve realized is that every acquisition is different. My last company had 350 people and was acquired by a larger company. This time, we were just eight, so the scale and context were completely different. One of the most impressive things about Shopify is how Tobi embraces the founder mentality.

This approach matters even more in a remote company. You want people who are naturally inclined to take action. During the acquisition process, we looked at our team and asked what the most significant problems at Shopify were. From there, we were placed on the teams that could benefit most from our skills.

How do you ensure an acquisition delivers value and integrates well?

People often forget that M&A is not just about the acquisition. The merging part is just as important. When you're acquired, you are not only bringing in people or a product. You are also bringing a unique set of knowledge and experience, and that should actively influence the acquirer.

A great example is Kevin Scott, who was the CTO of LinkedIn when Microsoft acquired them. He later became the CTO of Microsoft. That kind of transition, where leadership from the acquired company takes on major roles within the acquirer, adds huge value. The same thing has happened at Shopify. As I mentioned earlier, many of Tobi’s executive team are former founders.

In my case, I went from leading a team of eight at my own company to leading teams of up to 3,000 at various points in my career at Shopify. It is a strategy more companies should consider. For example, when Apple acquired NeXT, they brought back Steve Jobs and made him CEO. Moves like that are often overlooked, but they can be transformative.

What makes Shopify successful?

One thing that sets Shopify apart is how much we care about making our merchants successful. A lot of companies say they care about their customers, but at Shopify, our incentives are actually aligned. We only make money if our merchants make money. When a merchant finds more buyers, sells more products, and grows their business, we benefit too. That alignment puts us on the same side of the table.

In some businesses, you might buy a product that ends up being disappointing, and that’s the end of the interaction. But at Shopify, if a merchant thrives, we thrive. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. The second thing is that we focus almost entirely on building the best product. We do not spend as much time talking about revenue or traditional business metrics.

We also take a very long-term view. For example, when there was a lot of excitement around NFTs, we could have added basic NFT functionality quickly. But instead, we built infrastructure that would allow anyone to add NFT features in just an hour. That took more time up front, but it gave us a foundation that will last much longer. We try to build tools that others can build on top of, not just one-off features.

What does your day-to-day look like leading engineering?

Because product is our top priority, a lot of my day is spent thinking about the infrastructure behind what we’re building. When we do product reviews, we do not just look at what something does for the merchant. We go deep into how it is built. We want to make sure we are not introducing hidden ceilings or creating friction in the user experience.

For example, sometimes a feature might have a hard limit that slows down growth later, or the UX might add a subtle toll for the merchant. So we dig into the technical details to make sure what we are building is scalable and extensible.

We also spend a lot of time in the weeds of active projects. Every four weeks, we do what we call six-week reviews, now split into two batches. In one cycle, we review half of the company’s projects, and in the next cycle, we review the other half. The goal is to make sure we are working on the right problems with the right people. If something is no longer a priority, we stop doing it and move on. We do not take a hands-off approach. We pair smart people with important problems and stay close to the work so we can help steer it in the right direction.

How do you assess whether a project is working or needs to change?

We’re big believers in small teams. Sometimes a project just needs more people or different expertise, but a lot of the time, we are looking at two key things. First, is it being built on the right infrastructure? That matters because the foundation affects everything that comes after. Second, do we have a strong opinion on why and how this solution will work for merchants? We are not fans of blindly A/B testing or throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. That is not the Shopify way.

Many of us are merchants ourselves. So we try to deeply understand the problem, gather feedback, and design toward a clear solution. If a project is taking too long, our instinct is usually to reduce the team size. It sounds counterintuitive, but sometimes a larger team creates overhead that actually slows things down. So we look at how things are built, whether we believe in the solution, and whether the team is set up in a way that helps or hurts progress. Then we adjust accordingly.

Who’s on your team and how is it structured?

It has shifted over time. Last year, I was directly running the core engineering team. I had a mix of VPs and directors of engineering reporting to me, each responsible for different parts of the core experience. Then I pivoted to lead our distinguished engineering team. That was more like an individual contributor role, where three distinguished engineers reported to me. Their job was to work on priority-zero, horizontal projects that cut across all of engineering.

More recently, I’ve started focusing on operations and go-to-market. I’ve taken on some non-R&D teams and have been working on automating and applying AI to those areas to reduce manual work. So over the last six months, I’ve been involved in very different parts of the company.

How do you balance gut instinct with user feedback?

We think of it this way: merchants are experts in their problems, but they are not necessarily experts in the solutions. They live in the problem space every day, so our job is to learn from them; to understand the problem as deeply as possible without jumping straight to their suggested fixes.

What product principles guide Shopify?

We actually have a document internally called the Product Principles. At the top of that list is: build the best product. That’s number one. Number two is: make money, but only to support number one. And number three is: never reverse those priorities.

The idea is that if we keep building the best product, everything else will follow. We take a long-term view. Tobi often says, “We’ve only been doing this for 21 years—why would we think we’ve already solved it?” That mindset keeps us focused. People ask why we don’t expand into new categories, but our response is always, ‘Let’s keep getting better at what we’re already doing.’

For example, our focus is still on making the finished goods experience work perfectly on Shopify. We are obsessed with that. And we keep pushing down that path instead of chasing every new opportunity or trend.

How does goal-setting work at Shopify?

Instead of traditional goals, we work with themes. The reason is that themes have no fixed end; they are ongoing. For example, one theme from last year was ‘Shopify keeps me on the cutting edge.’ That means merchants should never have to worry about staying up to date with the latest AI developments because we’re doing that work for them.

Another theme might be ‘Shopify must be reliable,’ which is something we pursue endlessly. There’s no point where we say, ‘It’s fast enough’ and stop. Even when a third-party tweet showed Shopify was far ahead of other platforms on speed, our internal dashboard still marked performance as red. We weren’t satisfied.

These themes guide our work year-round. We have metrics and dashboards to track progress, but the themes themselves are long-term. They get updated once a year, every January 1st, when Tobi announces them. But internally, we operate on a weekly cadence. We expect progress every week and use internal tools, nudges, async demos, and product updates to keep things moving. Every six months, we do a public-facing release called Editions.

What’s different about Shopify’s engineering approach compared to other tech companies?

One thing that sets Shopify apart is how intentional we are about both our tools and our culture. In many companies, engineers experiment freely, adopting the latest tools, libraries, or frameworks just because they’re new. We take a more focused approach.

We choose a small set of core technologies, like Ruby, Rails, React, and React Native, and we go deep. We become core contributors, push improvements upstream to open source, and use those tools consistently across the company. That way, engineers can move between teams without needing to relearn tech stacks, and we avoid the noise of chasing every new trend. It also supports better engineering decisions at scale.

Culturally, we talk a lot about creating 10x engineering environments. That means building systems and infrastructure that help people build the right thing, the right way. Engineers don’t just work with what’s already available. We encourage them to imagine the ideal infrastructure for a feature, even if it doesn’t exist yet. They prototype as if it does, and then we work backward to create or modify what’s needed.

We do not believe in strict ownership silos. Instead, we think of people as stewards of different areas. If you want to improve something, you can work directly with those stewards to make it better. That keeps us close to the frontline and focused on building simple, extensible infrastructure that others can build on.

How is Shopify using AI, and how do you measure its impact across the company?

We were early adopters of AI. Just two months after ChatGPT launched, we released AI-powered product descriptions. Since then, we’ve added background image removal, smart image placement, and Sidekick—an AI assistant that helps merchants generate reports, create discounts, build collections, and more. It’s designed to reduce friction and help merchants get things done faster.

Our help center also uses AI. Merchants can screen share and get live guidance, like updating DNS settings. The goal isn’t to keep them in the product longer, but to help them move faster so they can focus on growing their business.

Internally, we’ve used AI in engineering since the early days of GitHub Copilot. We track code completion acceptance rates—about one-third of suggestions are accepted—and monitor developer happiness and productivity. We also use AI across ops and go-to-market. For example, we turned a 90-minute onboarding checklist into a two-minute automated flow, increasing output 45x. Instead of hard metrics, we focus on real adoption and impact. We use themes, surveys, and real-world feedback to guide our AI strategy, making sure it removes toil and amplifies the work of our best people.

What do successful founders or companies have in common?

For me, angel investing is about learning, not making money. I invest to get close to founders and learn from how they think. The best ones usually share two key traits: curiosity and patience. Great founders are deeply curious. They follow problems, ask questions, and explore where things lead. And the very best ones are relentlessly patient. No matter how difficult things get, they stick with the problem and keep pushing forward.

You never really know how big or small a problem will turn out to be. Some that seem tiny at first become massive. Others fade. But when a founder is both curious and willing to stay in the game, they give themselves a real shot.

The same goes for companies. A great company is often just a long-term exploration of a single problem space. Shopify, for example, exists to answer one question: how do we make entrepreneurship more common? Everything we do stems from being obsessed with that problem.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

One thing that might be unusual about me is that I can become interested in almost anything. We have a saying at Shopify: everything is interesting if you go deep enough. I really believe that. Even if it’s something like an insurance seminar—which sounds boring—I’ll take notes, ask questions, and try to understand how it works.

Recently, I shifted into go-to-market and operations, which are totally different areas, but I was able to dive in because I found ways to make them interesting. It’s a personal hack that works well for me: turn curiosity into motivation.

And that’s it! You can follow and connect with Farhan over on LinkedIn and Twitter, and don’t forget to check out Shopify’s website.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

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