Creating exceptional developer experiences at Shopify is fundamental to the company's success. As Eytan Seidman, Director of Product at Shopify, explains, this focus spans both the platform's external developers and Shopify's internal teams.
How Shopify expands developer capabilities and reduces friction
Shopify's approach to developer experience centers on two critical pillars: expanding developer capabilities and reducing friction.
Seidman emphasizes that the first pillar ensures developers have robust, flexible building blocks to easily access, modify, and use to extend and customize the platform. This focus supports both merchant developers and third-party app creators in building more effectively.
The second pillar is an intense focus on minimizing obstacles in the development process. Shopify prioritizes creating intuitive, rewarding "getting started" experiences that help developers quickly achieve successful outcomes. It aims to shorten the time required to see their work in production and feel confident in the platform.
Shopify reflects this philosophy throughout its developer toolchain, even to its external developer audiences. They provide a unified CLI that consolidates separate workflows into one consistent interface, declarative webhooks that simplify integration by reducing boilerplate code, and their Hydrogen visual editor, which brings intuitive WYSIWYG editing to headless storefronts.Together, these features highlight how Shopify’s internal DevEx best practices directly shape a better developer experience for its users.
First-principles, mission-oriented thinking drives Shopify’s culture
Shopify's developer-friendly approach is deeply rooted in its mission-driven culture. "Our mission is to make commerce better for everyone. We're here to build phenomenal software for anybody who's looking to get started selling online or anywhere in the world," Seidman states.
This mission permeates the organization, from its founder-led approach to how it evaluates product decisions. Shopify maintains a relatively flat structure that minimizes bureaucracy and organizational politics, unlike many large companies. This structure allows the company to remain nimble and focused on its core mission rather than getting bogged down in internal processes.
The company hires people who align with this mission and excel in their crafts. Seidman describes Shopify as "a company for craftspeople," where excellence in design, UX, product, data science, or engineering is valued and fostered.
A cornerstone of Shopify's development philosophy is first-principles thinking. "Anytime we approach a problem, we try to understand what is true about the world and what key principles will guide us as we build this next piece of software," explains Seidman.
This approach encourages teams to deeply understand the fundamental truths about problems before building solutions. Rather than simply copying competitors or incrementally improving existing features, Shopify expects teams to question assumptions and develop strong, opinionated solutions.
The company actively resists compromise-driven development. Seidman shares a colorful analogy from Shopify's CEO: "Everybody loves rainbows... but if you take the colors and mush them together, you get brown... and it's far uglier than a rainbow." This anti-compromise stance means Shopify expects project champions of projects to have strong perspectives and make decisive choices rather than seeking consensus that results in mediocre outcomes.
Shopify also evaluates product success differently from many companies. Rather than relying solely on industry benchmarks, they've developed an internal "overall goodness factor" that balances qualitative understanding of product experiences with quantitative metrics. This approach allows them to maintain high standards for product quality that align with their mission rather than chasing industry trends.
High-autonomy culture empowers Shopify’s teams
One of Shopify's most distinctive characteristics is its high-autonomy culture. The company deliberately minimizes formal processes and bureaucracy, favoring individual agency and ownership.
"Every project has a champion," Seidman explains. "That champion is sometimes a product manager, but very often might be a designer, it might be a data scientist, it might be an engineer who's championing a project because they feel passionate about it."
This project-centric approach allows initiatives to form organically around passionate champions rather than being dictated by rigid organizational structures. Shopify provides employees high-level context about company strategy through leadership documentation, but expects individuals to identify opportunities and drive initiatives forward.
For new hires, this high-autonomy environment can initially be challenging to navigate. To support them, Shopify deliberately gives newcomers time to absorb the company's strategy and codebase before asking them to make significant contributions, encouraging them to focus first on learning and understanding.
By trusting employees to grasp and advance company objectives independently, Shopify fosters an environment where talented individuals can thrive. As Shopify continues to innovate at the intersection of commerce and technology, its focus on exceptional developer experiences, mission-driven culture, first-principles thinking, and high autonomy environment positions it as a leader not just in e-commerce but also in how modern software organizations can operate effectively at scale.
Listen to Eytan Seidman's Dev Interrupted episode:
