Shopify boss: “I try to create an environment where everyone feels uncomfortable all the time”


But where will Shopify stop in its quest for reorganization? The leaders of the e-commerce platform in SaaS mode are attacking meetingitis in a particularly brutal way. On the company’s first day back to work on Tuesday, they unveiled a plan, dubbed “Chaos Monkey 2023”. And he is radical.

No more meetings of more than two people. Gone are the days of public Slack channels that allow employees to chat. And to plead for “chaos engineering”, a computer concept where the infrastructure is tested with voluntary incidents. Chaos Engineering is also known as Chaos Monkey, “and at Shopify, we apply this practice not only in building great products for our customers — but in everything we do,” internal company documents say. according to Business Insider.

In fact, Shopify has already removed the public channel from the company’s Slack workspace for every employee. Also deleted the message history of these public channels. And each Slack channel is now limited to 150 members.

All employee meetings of more than two people have been canceled

The rest of the company’s communications to employees is now transferred to Workplace by Meta, to the much more top-down design of unified communication. But beyond the sprucing up of asynchronous communication, the most surprising announcement concerns the new rules concerning meetings.

All employee meetings of more than two people have been canceled (with the exception of meetings with customers and partners). The only time employees are allowed to host team events is Thursdays.

“It all seems chaotic, which is sort of the point,” a company executive explained by email. And to justify the rapidity of the implementation of these new directives to avoid “raising the temperature, by causing an intense degree of discomfort and distraction that we evacuate very quickly to be able to get on with the essentials.”

“So you end up with more and more people who are content to maintain the status quo”

And some employees regret, under the seal of anonymity, a corporate culture that until then allowed informal virtual discussions via unified communication tools. Already in August, the company had implemented measures to discourage negative and off-topic discussions about the company and its projects.

The company said the changes are aimed at improving employees’ ability to focus on their work. “These changes will help focus our time and attention, deliver faster and improve our operational excellence,” internal company documents say. “It will help Shopify, the company, keep pace with Shopify, the product.”

And it will be done the hard way. Shopify Founder and CEO Tobi Lütke said growth happens when people move away from comfort. “So what I’m trying to create is an environment where almost everyone around me feels uncomfortable all the time, because I’m dragging them into the next club,” he said. declared. “The best thing founders can do is subtract,” he continued. “It’s much easier to add things than to remove them. If you say yes to one thing, you’re actually saying no to all the other things you could have done in that time period. As you go As people add things, the set of things that can be done shrinks, and then you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo.”

Discomfort as a source of motivation?

Already last July, Shopify announced that it was parting with 10% of its workforce – nearly 1,000 employees worldwide – after the CEO admitted to having made a mistake in his post-pandemic forecasts.

The company expected the strong growth in online sales to continue coming out of the pandemic. “It is now clear that this gamble did not pay off,” acknowledges the CEO.

Shopify has 1.7 million merchants in 175 countries. The company has been established in France since 2018, coming to hunt on the land of competitors such as Prestashop, Magento, BigCommerce and others.





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