“We hire people who are well aligned to that mission and who are really awesome at their craft. So at the core, it's a company for craftspeople, right?

We're really treating people like adults, counting on them to show up every day, do their craft really well, and to come with ideas.”

In an organization as big as Shopify, how can you pioneer exceptional developer experience not only for your team but also for external developers using your product?

This week we’re joined by Eytan Seidman, Director of Product at Shopify to unpack Shopify's approach to building elite engineering teams. Eytan highlights how Shopify’s high-context, high-autonomy culture empowers engineers and product managers to innovate and drive impact. By leveraging a mission-driven culture, Shopify ensures that internal and external developers can contribute effectively to the platform, without being bottlenecked back by inefficient processes or developer experience.

Tune in this week, and discover how you can implement the same processes that have made Shopify so successful.

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:50 What makes engineering and product roles at Shopify special?
  • 03:31 How Shopify onboards new hires to drive impact
  • 09:05 Pioneering developer experience at Shopify
  • 13:28 How Shopify defines success for their platform 
  • 17:50 Building high-context, empowered teams
  • 29:35 Leveraging AI and LLM’s as a growth opportunity
  • 35:29 Advice for product and engineering leaders thinking about their next career step

Links:

Transcript:

Eytan Seidman: 0:00

it's really critical that that champion that I mentioned has a strong perspective on where this thing should go. Um, and is really the person who should be taking charge on driving what might be very controversial decisions. and not just kind of agreeing on, oh yeah, we'll just take some of this and some of that. Uh, and so that champion rule has a really critical thing, which is like, hey, I have a certain thing I have in mind. Here's the outcome I want to achieve. Here's why that outcome matters. and I'm going to work like heck to make sure it happens

0:29

Is seven day cycle time. Good for your team. What about 150 lines of code in a pull request? Visibility into these metrics is not enough. You need to see how you stack up to overall industry performance in order to actually understand and define what elite performance looks like for your team. If you want a holistic view of your engineering performance, download linear B's 2024 for software engineering benchmarks report. Based on an in-depth analysis of more than 2000 dev teams and 3.6 million PRS. Linear B's benchmark report offers invaluable insights you can use to build your improvement strategy. ad to the show notes to get your copy today.

Conor Bronsdon: 1:09

Thanks so much for joining me. So we are back with another in-depth episode of Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Connor Bronson, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Eytan Seidman, director of Product at Shopify. Welcome to the show, Eytan.

Eytan Seidman: 1:22

Thanks, Conor. It's great to be here today, and I've really been looking forward to this.

Conor Bronsdon: 1:27

Yeah, Eytan you have a amazing background here. You've been a founder and VP of product@oyster.com, which was acquired by TripAdvisor, you're ex-head of product at Compass. And now you're doing some amazing stuff at Shopify, and I want to hear all about what Shopify is doing for developers. You're a new additions dot Dev, but first we should give our listeners some background about how Shopify is approaching development. Pretend I'm an engineering manager and you know, like many of our listeners, maybe I'm looking for a new role. And considering taking a role at Shopify, what sets your engineering and product orgs apart?

Eytan Seidman: 2:01

Yeah, it's a great question. I'll give you the slightly long winded answer, which I definitely give to candidates when they're interviewing, because I find it's the best way to answer it, and I think it works pretty well. so I think first and foremost, it starts with being a mission oriented, founder led company. and that really cuts through like a lot of BS on its own. Um, so I think all companies have missions, uh, but I think Shopify is probably better than most, uh, in a lot of ways. our mission is to make commerce better for everyone. We're here to really build phenomenal software for help, for anybody who's looking to get started selling online or really anywhere in the world. So it's kind of first and foremost as being mission led, founder led is a key part of it. The second thing is we hire people who are well aligned to that mission. And who are really awesome at their craft. So at the core, it's a company for craftspeople, right? If you are amazing at your craft, whether it's design or UX or product, data science, every crafter is led by a manager who is also a craft and excellent at that craft. Um, and all the way up to Toby, um, is really the case. let's get to the second thing I'd say. it's also like a very high agency, high context culture. Uh, it is not, uh, a culture where there's lots of process, there's lots of bureaucracy. We try and really limit the number of, like Policies we have in general or any anything of that nature, uh, we're really treating people like adults, counting on them to show up every day, uh, do their craft really, really well, and, and to come with ideas. and then lastly, it's a culture that really thrives, and expects people to think from first principles. you know, anytime we approach a problem, we try and understand, okay, well, like, what, like, what is true about the world, right? Um, and what are kind of key principles that are going to guide us as we go out and build this next piece of software, um, or go and build this feature. and so I think when you take all those things together, right, it's like it's a mission company. Uh, we care a ton about having phenomenal crafters who are really great at what they do. We give them a lot of agency, uh, give them a lot of context, uh, it creates an environment where people can do phenomenal work, where you can come and say, Hey, I want to go and fix this thing, and here's why that's really important, and here's why it matters to, to Shopify, and, and we, we go off and do those things.

Conor Bronsdon: 4:11

And I would concur. I think that's a really exciting thing as someone who's coming into Shopify. Eyes engineering org. I think, oh, I can be impactful here. I can have a high degree of agency, but I can imagine when people onboard, there are also challenges that come with this. If there is a lot of context within the culture, that means there are a lot of things you need to understand to do your work well. It means you have to adjust to the approach that teams taking. How do you make this work for new hires?

Eytan Seidman: 4:36

Yeah, it's a great question. it is, uh, it is definitely one of the challenges. And one of the things that people ask me very often, I actually did an interview this morning, they're like, you know, what are some of the challenges for folks joining? Uh, and one of the things is that, There is a lot of context that you have to understand about commerce and about the product. Shopify at the end of the day is actually really one product, right? We're not like a multi product conglomerate. We really have what is a single product for the most part, which is a Shopify admin and the storefront that helps you control that storefront, all the apps that go along with it. And so there are, there is a lot. I think one of the things that we do is we You know, we tell people like, Hey, don't worry actually about contributing anything of meaning in your first, say, 60, 90 days, right? What we really want you to do is to learn and to really understand, the code base. If you're working in engineering, to understand the product design, to understand all the product decisions that have been made as much as possible. Uh, so that as you go about doing things, you understand kind of what you're doing. Now we do get people up to speed. We've got ways to do that. You know, Uh, basic pull requests, things of that nature to get people going. but part of it is just like giving space and opportunity for people to get that context.

Conor Bronsdon: 5:48

Yeah, it's a really interesting one because I think a lot of software developers coming into a, a new role at an organization like Shopify, yeah. They do wanna get that first pr and they, whether or not it's a highly impactful one, they do want to get a sense of like, how does our, our process to actually getting code in the database work. I'm curious how this meshes with this deep like product led ethos, founder led ethos that clearly infuses Shopify. how do folks kind of figure out what to make an impact on post that initial learning period? I.

Eytan Seidman: 6:23

So typically, it, it depends on, on who you are, but like if you're a typical kind of crafter working in software engineering, um, what you'll do is you'll either glom onto a project that, uh, your lead might say, Hey, I think you can be really impactful on this project. Here's why it's a great one for you to learn about the area. Uh, and then as you kind of, you know, spend more time in the product, you're going to start to have your own desires and things to work on. And so the nature of it is like, you know, a good chunk of what we do is kind of, if you will, comes from top down strategy, but a good amount also comes from just bottoms up, hey, here are projects that we think are critical to building out the infrastructure of Shopify. Uh, we invest a ton of our engineering cycles in just, Improving the underlying foundation upon which all of our products are built. Uh, and we're actually, we're huge believers in, uh, in that, that in order to build great features, we have to have great infrastructure with us. Our database infrastructure, um, our API layer, uh, you know, uh, API, uh, uh, rate limiting technology, all those sorts of things, um, are kind of critical infrastructure pieces. And so it's kind of a combination of like, Hey, someone's coming from your lead. Some of it over time though, we expect to come from the crafters themselves and to say, Hey, I want to go work on that thing. Uh, or I want to go champion that thing. And so one of the things that we have is every project has a champion. Uh, and like I said, sometimes. You know, probably starts off, you're working on a project that somebody else is championing, and then over time, you're graduating to become a champion yourself.

Conor Bronsdon: 7:51

It's really interesting to hear how much of this work is kind of bubbling up from the crafters within Shopify. Do you have a breakdown, uh, that you track of what that percentage is of, hey, this is tops down a lot tightly aligned to business priorities versus, Hey, we're discovering these are things we want to work on. I'm

Eytan Seidman: 8:09

it's not something that we track on an ongoing basis. The observation I've had, though, is that as the organization has become, so I work on our dev platform, uh, which is helping enable developers to build applications for Shopify. Uh, we've been in kind of in this formation, if you will, for about four years now. And one thing I've noticed is that as that organization becomes really high context, really understands the strategy that we're trying to achieve, there is this kind of meshing of top down and bottoms up, right? Like you don't see like a lot of massive deviation because people are like, okay, hey, this really makes sense. I get where we're going as a company. So in our case, you know, we've been investing a lot in building out a platform alongside of our product. Uh, and so there's a lot of things you need to do to invest in the underlying primitives, um, the right DX to enable the use of those primitives, uh, the UI layers on top of those. And so people start to see, okay, this is the next piece of the puzzle that we need. Uh, and so you just don't have, like, a lot of this, like, shock of like, oh, wow, I'm so surprised that, like, we're, we're going in that direction now.

Conor Bronsdon: 9:15

And this, I presume, also is a, a major argument for a high retention culture within Shopify's engineering product orgs where keeping craftsmen around, having folks who want to stick around for several years as you have, really increases this ability to tightly align with. The approach of leadership and kind of the business priorities, uh, while also giving folks agency to go out and act. And, uh, as we've seen and research from, you know, Google and elsewhere, when, um, folks in their roles feel that they are able to make an impact, it's a, it's a high indicator of happiness and success within the team. And it obviously boils up, uh, within the company. As far as successful, uh, initiatives, and you mentioned an initiative that is, is very commonly being talked about today here by elite engineering orgs like yours, developer experience. And because you're building both this external facing Dev tools for, uh, Shopify developers, but you also have to consider the internal development culture at Shopify. How do you think about DevX or developer experience, uh, in your role?

Eytan Seidman: 10:20

I'll talk mostly about, external developer. Uh, so the work that we do for first party, third party app developers, theme developers, uh, people who are building on top of our platform, uh, that could be a merchant themselves. So take like an Allbirds, for example, they might be building custom applications or, I'm a big fan of Atom Shoes, um, they're, they're, they might be building, you know, custom apps to sell Atoms, uh, things of that nature, Uni Pizza Oven. So these are all merchants on Shopify who need to extend the platform themselves, but there's, there's also third party developers who are building apps to sell in the store. Um, when, when we look at those, like those kind of two large group of developers, um, what we think about are, are first and foremost is capabilities, right? What are the key underlying things that they can. Touch and manipulate, um, and yeah, and leverage as a part of it. And so we've actually been doing a lot of work to increase the capabilities and to just to ground that in reality, like, Hey, I want to build something that allows me to manipulate checkout based on the contents of the cart. So we have a product called Shopify functions that enables developers to do that, which is basically. It's a commerce oriented function that takes as input the cart, uh, and then outputs a set of, like, mutations to that cart. Uh, so that's a good example of capability, and we've been running with that and increasing capabilities for, for developers, again, both these merchant developers and our third party application developers. And that's really important, right? Because the more capability that you have, the more platform opportunity there is for everybody, and the more merchants can get done, and utilize your, your underlying commerce stack. And then the second part is the actual just DX of building the experience, right? So, hey, when I go to build this application, what is it like? And there we focus on kind of a couple things. Like, first is that getting started experience, right? How fast can I get started? Uh, and so we all the time are pushing ourselves and saying, Hey, from the time I go, So I can go and do Shopify app create initially to, to, to an app to the time I can like get that kind of like dopamine of like, hey, this thing works and it does something, uh, how fast can it be, uh, and how, and how can we remove as much friction as possible, uh, for it. So that's kind of like what, you know, kind of the YOLO dev. I want to get started. I want to move fast. Uh, and then the second part of DX is when. I am working as a member of a team, perhaps, a couple of people, three people, and how can I actually make changes on an ongoing basis? I might have my local dev app, I might have a staging server, and then my production server. And so both of those really matter a lot. How fast can you get going, but then do you have the capabilities to actually work inside of like, you know, a team environment?

Conor Bronsdon: 13:01

It is interesting because I think most of the conversations we have about developer experience, uh, on this show are much more internal facing, uh, where it's, Hey, I have a team of a hundred devs. How do I keep them happy? How do I make sure they're being enabled? Or, Hey, I'm a principal engineer, I. Here's how I want my team to be enabled. Here's how I want to kind of like guide this organization. So it's really cool to hear your perspective of kind of this dual tracks of like, we both have to consider our internal space and as a company that's building a Dev tools platform and a, a leader within that space, you have this major consideration and often. Shopify is used both by like major teams and also small business owners. So there's these like whole other set of considerations where it's like, how do I help an individual or like couple people make our tools be more successful for them?

Eytan Seidman: 13:47

I'll just add one thing to the prior point is that, the same tools that we, um, give developers to build these applications or themes, uh, uh, who are merchant developers or third party developers, we actually use those same tools ourselves when we go to build first party applications. So, Shopify has a kind of core product that comes in a box. But then we're also building apps on it, just in the same way that, you know, Hey, iOS has an app that you can go and download from the app store. So those exact same tools we're utilizing ourselves. So we get a real feel for like, okay, how well is this platform working? Right. Does it have the right capabilities? Um, the right primitives? Uh, how is the DX? So we got a really, a lot of really great insights to that.

Conor Bronsdon: 14:28

So how do you define that success? What does success look like for you on this platform you're developing.

Eytan Seidman: 14:34

know, again, kind of zooming out a little bit. I'd say that Shopify is very much a product experience company, right? We care a ton about product experience. Uh, how well is this piece of software crafted? How easy is it to use and get started again, whether that's for our merchant experience or for our developer experience, uh, and we put a lot of weight on the qualitative experience, right? We, the, the notion of product sense matters to us a lot. And it, it's for every, for every craft, right? It's not just, uh, product managers. It's every craft kind of has a sense of like, is this thing working well? Uh, and so we have like kind of our own internal. Um, I refer to it as like OGF, uh, Overall Goodness Factor, right? How good does this feel? uh, how well is it working? And then we've also got kind of qualitative indicators of the OGF, uh, which is like, um, is it, you know, when we hear from merchants or developers, what are we hearing from them? And so that, that kind of creates for all of us like this internal scorecard that we have of like, well, where are the big gotchas? Where is the big friction?

Conor Bronsdon: 15:32

That context piece you mentioned earlier.

Eytan Seidman: 15:34

Yeah, exactly. Right. You've got a ton of context. You use the product daily. You're talking to customers, whether it's developers or merchants on an ongoing basis. And so you just have this knowledge in your, floating in your brain of like what good should feel like. Uh, and again, but not just feel like, but also like, where are the gaps? Where are the things that are really holding people back or holding you back? but then beyond that, you know, things that we look at, if you kind of look at those two, those two segments of folks that, um, that I mentioned, when it comes to like, uh, uh, meaning the Getting Started Fast group, and then there's like, I'm working in a team group. Uh, when it comes to the Getting Started Fast, we have a lot of really good indicators, right? We know, you know, what percentage of people who create an app actually succeed and get it, that app installed on eStore. Um, we know the time, how long is it taking them to go do those things. So there's a lot of kind of quantitative, um, data that we can accumulate about, about how well that experience is working. When it comes to the second group of like working, you know, who are, who are working with many devs, let's, let's say, you know, me, you and another person are working together to go build an application. Um, there, it tends to be a little bit more qualitative, uh, because there's things like CI, CD integration, um, things of that nature, but we still have a lot of, you know, good data points, um, that, that help us, you know, that give us a good, a good sense of whether things are working well.

Conor Bronsdon: 16:49

Do you benchmark against other industry sources or other teams, or is it mostly an internal benchmarking of, Hey, we feel like success is here based off of these qualitative signals that we get from our customer base and from our internal surveys.

Eytan Seidman: 17:03

Yeah, I'd say it's mostly the latter, right? It's mostly like our own internal benchmarking of, uh, what do we think good looks like and why? Um, it, cause it goes back to some of that first principles thinking that we, that we spoke about, right? Where we have a clear opinion on how the software should be used and why we think it's overall a good thing. Uh, and so we can say, Hey, this is what we think good looks like. So for example, one of the things that we look at is, within the app developer platform space is, you know, how's our CLI being utilized and how many folks are using Configuring their application, um, utilizing kind of a source code file rather than doing it like imperatively in a UI. So we, so we track that data. Um, we don't look at external benchmarks there. I don't know if they're, they're available, but, but mostly we have a good sense of, Hey, we think the vast majority of people should be using this because, you know, Uh, strategically, it makes a ton of sense even for them, right? Hey, my, all of my config can be checked in as code. Um, I can easily duplicate environments if I go and need to. So that's a good example of a feature where we have our own sense of like what good looks like.

Conor Bronsdon: 18:05

Awesome. I I do love that because you are a company of crafters, of builders, of developers who are kind of building for developers. You have this internal compass that you're able to develop as you are participating in this process and, and communicating with customers. I will shout out since you asked if they are available, we do have benchmarks available at LinearB dot io slash benchmarks that benchmark a lot of these quantitative signals, uh, around software development and, and what success looks like. Uh, and there's some really interesting ones coming on qualitative too. So, uh, you know, if you ever have a chance to look at'em, would love your feedback on that. I'd be curious to understand more about how the day-to-day functioning of Shopify engineering and product teams, uh, kind of works the social circuitry, so to speak. Um, how are teams constructed given this high degree of autonomy and this kind of mission-driven focus?

Eytan Seidman: 18:57

so it'll start typically, again, people will have a good degree of context from strategy that will come from leadership or that's Toby himself or other, other leaders in the company that, that those docs are, you know, posts are floating around internally a lot. So people have a good degree of, okay, this is where we're headed. Uh, we have kind of like loose roadmaps like any other company would. About, hey, here's the, here are kind of the key things that we want to be true in, say, six months or 12 months or 18 months. Uh, and then what happens is, uh, we have an, we have our internal mechanism to create projects. Uh, and for people to kind of basically, like I said, attach themselves to that project. So every project has a champion. Uh, 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 and because they feel they're really high context to go do it. So, hey, uh, we actually recently, I'll tell you about one that we released recently. Um, we used to kind of have like three slightly different CLI experiences for apps, themes, and storefronts, uh, and a really talented engineer on the team said, Hey, we should kind of unify these to give like a really consistent DX, whether you're building an app, a theme, or a storefront. Uh, and so we actually just kind of announced it, um, in June as a part of our addition, uh, the unified CLI. So whether you're building any of those three, you get a very kind of familiar DX about it. Uh, and again, like I mentioned, that was championed by this engineer. A couple of other engineers, uh, you know, attached themselves to that project. Um, and then, uh, and then, you know, there was a product manager and designer that worked on it as well. So it, it's really kind of taking this loose roadmap and then people kind of form into teams around, but it's around the project. Um, the project is kind of the, The, the key atom, if you will, that, that is, is the thing, um, and, and that project has all the artifacts attached to it, whether, you know, designs, tech, you know, whether those are UX designs, tech designs, it might have a short brief attached to it, uh, it explains, you know, hey, these are the key assumptions I have in the project, and these are the key outcomes I want to achieve, uh, and then we have, like, a mechanism for both, like, peer review and also, like, leadership review of that project.

Conor Bronsdon: 21:15

It is a really interesting process because I know there are other companies that leverage something similar, but what it almost reminds me of is government in a collaborative fashion of like, Hey, we have people who are, you know, creating a bill or in this case a project and proposing it, and then you get, get people to sign on and say, oh, we think this is a good idea. Uh, you get buy-in broadly and then go execute it. Um, it, it's a really interesting system because of how I would say democratic It is in a lot of ways. Um, and I'm sure as we kind of alluded to earlier, that brings a lot of, team satisfaction benefits and also works really well given the high degree of context that your developers and your builders or crafters have given that they're using these same tools every day themselves. Uh, so it's a, it's a fascinating kind of alignment here where I think a lot of people listening would go, oh, well, my product, my devs don't understand it well enough yet. I need to kind of give them more guidance. and I would almost challenge folks in the audience and say, like. Are you giving your teams enough context, enough opportunity to get context? Are they being able to be close enough to the bare metal? Um, I, I know it's not gonna work for everyone, but I I I love that you're kind of talking through this process.'cause I, I think it's, it's really interesting to think about how other product leaders approach this.

Eytan Seidman: 22:30

I mean, I think there is a lot of that to it. I think there's one key difference is that like versus say government is that we, this is kind of like a quotable thing is like we actually are very anti compromise. Uh, Kaz, our CEO has a saying, he's like, everybody loves rainbows, right? Uh, you know, but if you like take the colors, imagine like a paint painting of a rainbow that is like still wet. If you take the colors And like, you know, mush them together, you get brown, and like, you know, and it's a really gross brown, and nobody likes that. Uh, and it's far uglier than a rainbow. Uh, and so, we believe that like, it's really critical that that champion that I mentioned has a strong perspective on where this thing should go. Um, and is really the person who is, uh, should be taking charge on driving what might be very controversial decisions. and not just kind of You know, agreeing on, oh yeah, we'll just take some of this and some of that. Uh, and so that champion rule has a really critical thing, which is like, hey, I have a certain thing I have in mind. Here's the outcome I want to achieve. Here's why that outcome matters. Uh, and I'm going to work like heck to make sure it happens.

Conor Bronsdon: 23:39

And I, I appreciate you clarifying that because, uh, as you mentioned earlier, like this is a high autonomy culture, a high ownership culture, yeah, I, I hope my metaphor isn't, isn't making it feel too like, oh, we're getting bogged down in legislation. Like, I think that's very clear. That's not Shopify's approach given how much y'all do ship. And given the, like, incredible stuff that Shopify recently rolled out at your new editions dot Dev, one of your two times yearly, uh, events and releases that you roll out. I, I'd love to understand more about what Shopify is shipping for software development teams and how you see that impacting software development for the, you know, millions of developers who are leveraging Shopify.

Eytan Seidman: 24:20

That's a great question. So, additions is this thing that we do twice a year. which basically gives a roundup, like almost a changelog of everything that we have shipped over the, like, over the prior six months. Um, and we, we try and make it as, um, as complete as possible. Uh, so it's not actually just like a few things. It really is showing everything. And that's why, like, you'll see there's, you know, a hundred or a hundred, you know, These are 50 pieces of either new or improved functionality that gets released as a part of it. Our most recent one, uh, that we just did in June, just to kind of set the stage and give you some context, zooming out a bit, um, is, it was called Unified. And like when, when a piece of software first ships, right, like I've been at the startup stage, um, it's like clean, there's no like duplicative systems, there's like no migrations, like everything like works totally flawlessly because like this thing is like brand freaking new, right? Uh, and, and there's no, there's nothing that really stops it from being like that. Um, then over time, you start to like add in a lot of features, uh, and growth to keep up with the market. Your customers say, Hey, I want X, I want Y, I want Z, and, and what tends to happen, is it usually comes at the expense of product quality. So if you kind of imagine like quality starts to like degrade, um, as you're growing the number of features, I think is quite common, which is why you end up with these, like after 30 years, incredibly bloated, whether it's whatever, ERP, CRM, like, you know, Because it's like 30 years of stuff just adding up. Um, and nobody really paying it down. So, so the theme that we have for this one is unified. And, like, we are, we are deep believers that, um, unified infrastructure, you know, is really important fuel to make our software really good. Um, and so, as I mentioned, we've added a ton of capabilities from the platform perspective, and I'll just name a few, whether it's like the ability to do subscriptions, like, really well, or, uh, bundles, or discounts. I mentioned Shopify Functions is, is a, is a way to go do that, to do things like discounting. Um, and You know, that's happened at a remarkable rate, but our platform's full potential, um, can only truly be recognized when its parts are seamlessly integrated. Right? It has to be the case that, um, hey, I go and utilize this subscription primitives in one place, I can go and utilize it in another place. Uh, and so that, that's really what we, we just did with unification. Um, and, um, that we just released as a part in June. Uh, and so I mentioned like the CLI as an example of that, where we're working to integrate all the different CLIs into one cohesive and seamless experience. And so we're doing that in numerous places across our platform.

Conor Bronsdon: 27:00

Fantastic. I really appreciate that overview, and I'd love to highlight some of the other key tools or opportunities that are available to developers who are, uh. Looking at all the great stuff that you and your teams are putting out, what are some of those other highlights that, uh, developers should be considering as far as new tools or features that may enable them to start their own business or build upon what they're already doing?

Eytan Seidman: 27:23

so thinking about like kind of, again, app and theme developers, like you said, millions of app and theme developers who are building or, you know, hundreds of thousands who are building on top of Shopify. Um, I'll call it a few things. So. Um, one is, you know, around making like headless more efficient. Uh, so about two years ago now, we released something called Hydrogen, um, which is a framework for building headless storefronts, along with Oxygen, which is our hosting layer. Um, we recently announced the Hydrogen Visual Editor. Which gives folks a like WYSIWYG editor for headless storefronts, which is really awesome, right? So it enables basically not just developers But like other folks in the company to kind of go work in a headless environment And that's kind of like rounding out that offering making it so It works really well now in this case. Also, you might be like thinking like wow, that's probably producing some some nasty code and

Conor Bronsdon: 28:10

thinking that it's great for bad developers like me, so.

Eytan Seidman: 28:12

Yeah, uh, so it's really, uh, it does a phenomenal job at making sure that your code can remain a source of truth and like not producing like a bunch of garbage in there. So that's kind of like one thing I'd highlight. The other is that from an app perspective, we want app developers to build really, to build experiences that are tightly integrated with the rest of our admin and the rest of our channels, if you will, which is like, you know, POS and checkout, like all the places where, um, where, where merchants and buyers exist. So we launched something called the admin print extension, uh, which gives developers the ability. to, um, do printing in a really seamless way inside of Shopify Admin. So here's the use case. Uh, imagine that I'm building an app that helps you do a custom packing slip, uh, yeah, a custom packing slip or a custom invoice. It lets you put your logo on it. It maybe even has like some conditionals depending on the sort of customer it's in. So you can now build, as an app developer, all of that functionality, and then you can print directly from our orders index using the Admin Print Extension. So it allows you to integrate your software really tightly into it. Um, another example of this, again for app developers, is our Flow Template App Extension, right? So Flow is a tool that helps you automate things, right? It's basically if this, then that. Um, so developers can now ship their own automations as a part of an application, right? So coming back to our scenario of like packing slips and invoices. Um, imagine I had an automation. After every order is created, then you can go and do, do like, do do this thing with it. Um, I can go and ship that automation as a part of my application. Uh, so we give developers more surface area to, uh, for discovery of their applications. Uh, and also just, you know, it, it reduces the burden for them. They don't have to go build those automations. They can go and leverage a tool like flow. Um, so those are kind of a couple of examples of like, of what, you know, what I, what I mean when I say like, unified software, right? So. From Hydrogen's perspective, totally unified, um, experience for, uh, for storefront creators, whether it's, hey, I'm writing code, or I need a WYSIWYG editor, uh, and then, and then giving app developers a way to seamlessly integrate into all aspects of Shopify.

Conor Bronsdon: 30:24

Given you and Shopify's general focus on. Incredible developer experience, enabling creators and also the rise of gen AI and AI agents. Do you see automations, uh, whether AI focused or, or more broadly as an area of particular growth or, or focus for the company over the next year or two?

Eytan Seidman: 30:47

Uh, absolutely. Like, we, I mean, we think that, At the core, both GenAI and LLMs is like transformative technology that will help along a couple of vectors. I think in certain instances, it's going to enable merchants and to a certain extent, developers to do things that were previously impossible for them to make them actually possible. And then in other cases, it'll just help folks get things done way faster. Let me give an example of each category. so one thing that we rolled out, it's probably been about six months ago, is, uh, for merchants, is the ability to easily, like, manipulate and edit photos. So, again, let's come back to, like, real world use cases. Um, I, I actually, my wife cooks a lot, um, and likes to bake, and so she, you know, I took a photo of some cookies that were on a, on a, like, a cooling rack. And imagine that I wanted to get rid of like the underlying cooling rack because I want to like make the cookies pop out more. Um, with the new capabilities that we have, you can do that sort of thing, right? You can go into our photo editing tools. You can basically say, Hey, uh, describe the background in, in natural language. Say, Hey, I just want a white background. It'll automatically detect like where the wire rack is, where the cookies are. It'll make the wire rack disappear. That's a good example. I think of. Making something possible that was previously impossible for a set of folks. Like I don't actually have the ability to go into like Photoshop and go do that, but now I can do that utilizing our tooling. So that's a kind of thing, a really cool example. In terms of just, and then there's a lot of examples of like things just being, You know, way faster to use. So, something that we just rolled out, um, on shopify. dev, which is our documentation site for all of our, you know, first party, third party app developers and theme developers, is something called the dev assistant. and what it does, it's focused right now on our GraphQL API. You can go in there and say, hey, because GraphQL is a little bit, kind of, steeper learning curve, You can go in there and say, Hey, uh, please create a query for me that will fetch the first five products and it will just produce the GraphQL for you, or I want to, you know, manipulate to create a new product with these variants and it'll just give you the GraphQL and you can just pop it into an editor and it'll, it'll work. Um, so you could probably, you know, most competent devs could probably do that, but it removes so much of the toil, uh, and like the labor, uh, involved in that. So those are a couple examples of like, on each end, of like, either making things that were previously not possible for somebody, making it possible, or just making things a lot faster and easier to use.

Conor Bronsdon: 33:22

Yeah, that increased velocity when you have large. documentation libraries to leverage large example libraries to leverage. Uh, there's a huge opportunity unlock that to your point, because I may not spend all my time working with GraphQL, but if I can leverage, uh, this tool to increase my velocity, but via the Dev assistant, like. That's a, a great way for me to save time. And given the aggregation of all that time saved across hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of developers, uh, that is huge time savings. And, you know, going back to that developer experience piece, like those are the little things that really add up when you look at a, a platform, whether it's on the quantitative side of just like, hey, hours saved or qualitative, like how people feel about it. So I, I love that example. What, uh, what do you think is next for Shopify as far as enabling developers?

Eytan Seidman: 34:09

I'd say broadly, we're continuing on, kind of, two themes I mentioned before, so one is increasing capabilities, giving whether it's merchant developers or first party app developers, um, So, you know, either more underlying capabilities or easier access to those capabilities. Uh, and then just like being relentless about the DX and saying, Hey, how can we make it faster and more frictionless to use? Uh, so something that we've, we've actually kind of give you like a little bit of a taste of the future. something that we're, that we've shared is we, we recently announced, this kind of capability around declarative webhooks, right? So imagine like typically when you want webhooks, you have to like. subscribe by some means and say, Hey, system, I want to be notified when this thing happens. Um, and in our case, you have to do that, like on every shop that you care about. It can kind of be quite labor intensive. Um, uh, we also have a storage mechanism to store data called metafields and meta objects. And again, there are a set of APIs involved in those. And so in both of these cases, we're moving these things to be highly declarative in nature, right? So you can like just. Give us your configuration and say, Hey, I want the system to be in this state. And as soon as you deploy that configuration, your app just gets into that state. So in the case of webhooks, it's already live. You can see it. So you just say, Hey, I want to be notified when any of these things happen. When you roll out your app. We will, we will basically take that, and anytime those things happen, we will send it to whatever end point you give us. Uh, and we're moving in that direction for data as well. Um, which is really neat, because if you think about data, like, one of the challenges is like, Hey, uh, before, you know, I had this shop had this schema, and this shop had that schema. And you have to like, keep track of all this stuff, and know how to like, deal with potential migrations. Right, like, hey, oh, I changed my schema, and I have to like, get everything into the same way. Right. Uh, and so we're going to make it possible to declaratively state, Hey, this is the schema I want, uh, and it will get every shop into that, into that, uh, setup. so those are examples of both like, you know, making the DX better, just making it easier to use, um, but then, but then also just giving you a bit more capability.

Conor Bronsdon: 36:14

I really appreciate your overview of Shopify's most recent additions dot Dev and the way you think about releasing these products and highlighting them. What I'd love to close our conversation with is some general advice to listeners in our audience. We have a lot of folks who are in similar roles like you, uh, and working as, as product or engineering leaders at other orgs, and then we have a lot of people who listen, who are aspiring engineering leaders, aspiring product leaders. What advice would you give to those two segments as they think about, you know, their next release or their next career step?

Eytan Seidman: 36:46

I'll gear it mostly towards product leaders, but I think a lot of it actually is for engineering leaders too. Uh, because, because both crafts I think should care about this a lot. The first thing I'd say that's really critical is you have to have a strategy. Right? And a strategy is like, what is the situation you're in? Like, who is the customer that you care about? Um, and where are you playing? to really be unique and different and to win. Um, I think it's really important. Now you don't need to have like a new strategy every six months. You should have one that should like be fairly, you know, well defined for like three to five years. Uh, the second thing is, Um, once you've got that is working to create, whether you are an engineering manager or product leader, um, a culture where the people working on individual features really understand how to articulate assumptions and also principles, right? Like, Hey, this is the state of the world as it is today, assumptions. And then these are the key principles which might be controversial. That are going to guide me to a solution. that kind of like thinking I think is incredibly valuable. because it actually encourages up front a lot of good debate about, Okay, well, is this actually a principle? Like, should this, like, is this the thing that should guide our development? And just really kind of creating that culture, I think, is just super valuable because it focuses on the subject matter, on the feature that you're building, um, in a really intense way. It allows for very good debate about it. The third thing is, uh, this is a bit maybe controversial, but it's kind of been well articulated, is like, be in the details, right? Like, leadership is not from my perspective, abdicating everything and saying, Oh, go do whatever you want. Being a leader is understanding how the thing works. Understanding how your product works today really, really well. Um, helping to guide and coach people of what good looks like. Um, you know, in my role as product is helping to set the bar for quality. of like, hey, you know, this thing needs to work really well, both in the happy path scenario, also on some of the edge cases. Uh, and being that kind of like bar setter, if you will, in terms of the quality of the product, I think is immensely valuable. And I think, uh, really helps set the right culture for, for, for creating high quality software. Um, uh, and then lastly, you know, again, we, we, we talked a lot about the culture at Shopify that we have. Thank you Uh, and it's making sure to empower other crafts. again, whether it's UX, engineering, data science, or product. Uh, I think it's really important that every craft has a perspective on where this product should go. Right, when we're working on, uh, the CLI, right, I, I expect and encourage engineers to be like, Hey, like, what do you think? Like, what, like, how, how should this work from your vantage point? you know, ours is not a culture and I would not encourage anybody to have a culture like, Oh, well, product is gonna make that decision, right? Um, that's not, that's not the way it should roll. Um, and, and so really making sure that you're setting that, you know, a culture, um, that can really do that where everybody's perspective, and I, I will very often have opinions on UX, much to the chagrin of, uh, sometimes folks working on the product. Um, but I'm like, hey, here's what I think, here, here's how I'm experiencing this product and why, why, why it's really good or where I'm struggling with it.

Conor Bronsdon: 40:04

I love it. That's some great advice and I, I particularly love that you highlighted this idea of, uh, staying close to the details even as you move up within the organization and are taking on leadership roles that are maybe more focused on broader strategy. Um, your colleague, James Stan, um, has been on the show before and wrote a great piece for us talking about, uh, the periphery of an organization and how important it is to, even as you kind of are becoming detached from maybe execution day to day on certain things, to stay really tight on what is happening on that periphery, what is happening on the bare metal with, uh, the folks who are using the tools. Um, and I think that's a challenge for a lot of leaders. Uh, how do you try to ensure that you are staying stuck in the details?

Eytan Seidman: 40:47

yeah, I've got a couple of like routines and rituals that I do. Um, I, so the first is I work to use our product every single day. Uh, I am, whether like, so I've got my own app that I work on, uh, that I'm building out new capabilities on top of. Uh, and then I'm also creating fresh apps all the time. I'm like, Hey, I just want to experience the DX. Like somebody who's coming to the platform for the first time is going to experience it. How is it going for them? How fast is it? Have we regressed in certain ways? Um, do we have any blind spots? And so in utilizing, like, every aspect of our product, the CLI, the docs, uh, the search in the docs, you like, just being in the product, there, there's really just no replacement for it. It's like, you could do, you know, you could think of the memes here, like, you could do all the user research in the world that you want, but like, you just have to know your product inside and out incredibly well. So I think that's, that's one thing I, I work to do. Uh, a ton of, uh, and then the second thing is I'll, I'll pick areas of the platform that I try and go deep on and understand, okay, well, how is this thing actually built, right? Uh, how is, you know, Our Flow app, how is the template search getting built? Um, you know, because hey, they recently released something that was really neat that made it, that made search way better. Um, I'm curious about how that's, how that's working. And so, it helps you just stay grounded, uh, in it. And then I'd say the last thing is, uh, you know, I do look at, whether it's open source or, um, or other startup projects, and I'm like, wow, like, they are kind of like living in the future. Let me go and see like what they're what they're cooking up here You know, it's always great to just like, you know Live in other people's future because that like that that's very often things that you want to be thinking about

Conor Bronsdon: 42:27

Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining me today, aan. Uh, I, I really enjoyed our conversation.

Eytan Seidman: 42:32

Thanks Connor, it was great. I appreciate it.

Conor Bronsdon: 42:34

For those listening, be sure to check out this week's edition of our Dev Interrupted newsletter over on Substack, and you can check out the article I mentioned about the periphery, which I think very much attaches to this conversation about how to think through a product organization, how to stay attached to things that's in our archives there. All of our old articles, all of our old podcasts are available on our substack at Dev dot substack.com, and we will see you next week. Thanks so much again.