The Intersection of Language, Culture, and Growth - Shopify Edition

johnson. i'm with an organization called nimzy insights, another organization called multilingual media. we publish a multilingual magazine, amongst other things. i'll let my colleague liz here introduce herself. hi, everybody, i am liz marcy. i am in enterprise sales for a company called translated, which many of you have heard of. we are headquartered in rome, but i am on the east coast of the us, in connectikut, outside of new york city, and really excited to be here with our guest speakers today. awesome, thank you, liz, and i'm trying to fix you all up on on the screen here. julia, welcome, thank you. hello everyone. i'm julia greco. i'm a localization programs lead at shopify and i am originally italian from milano, but i live in toronto, canada, welcome, welcome, and renoldo. yes, thank you for having me tucker. uh, my name is ronaldo daisiger. i'm not sure if that's the right pronunciation. sounds better than so in swiss german. it's originally. it's not sure if that's the beating, not sure if that's easier. um, i'm the managing partner and co-founder of supertext. we are a language service provider focusing on creative projects. i think we made ourselves a name for trans creation, stuff like that. i'm swiss, obviously, and i'm living in la since 2016.. the best of all worlds, swiss living in la. i love it. yes, exactly, tok to us a little bit about. uh. well, before we get into it, let's just introduce. let's uh do a quick setting of the room here. um, we're. this is clubhouse. this is not a webinar. it says that in the description we are broadcasting live. but the beauty of clubhouse is we get to have very fascinating conversations with fascinating people, um, and i very much look forward now, for the second week in a row, for getting to tok with people and facilitate conversations and moderate these conversations rather than just toking at everybody. so we have some very experienced, interesting people in the audience. i encourage you, please raise your hand if you'd like to come up to the stage. i'll try not to pick on people, but it's an open stage and i welcome you to come on up if you have a question or comment for the um, for the speakers today, ronaldo and julia, or um just have something that you'd like to say. so, with that, i'd like to um, start off here. let's start off with. uh, julia, let's go to you. tell us a little bit about localization, on what that means, in case there's people in the audience who are perhaps not familiar with localization and what it means for you and tucker not to jump ahead. but why don't we start with having our guest speakers introduce themselves and then we jump right in? just do that. yes, of course, introduce yourself first. i was thinking that the introduction would come as part of the opening spiel. so, great, great minds think alike cover my bases here. that's why we have two moderators. so, julia, would you like to go first? sure? um, okay, yes, so, as i said, i'm julia greco. i am a localization programs leader at shopify, which is a commerce platform. for those of you who may not know shopify, um, i'm italian from milano, but i've been living in toronto, canada, for 18 years- far too long. um, i wish i was a swiss living in la. instead, i'm in italian living in canada. i don't know where things went wrong. anyway, italy is nice too. come on, italy is very nice. i don't know why i'm not there. i am in canada right now, where it's like snowy and gray and slushy and just terrible overall. anyway, let's not dwell on that. um, so, yeah, i joined shopify four and a half years ago. um, i was hired as the italian translator. funny enough, a shopify, uh, four and a half years ago they weren't doing internationalization and localization. yet what they thought might be interesting and a good experiment to try was to translate their very successful english blog, which was, um, being read by about two million people in mostly north america, um, and other english-speaking places in the world. they thought: what if we just do an experiment and hire a bunch of translators and translate this thing in a bunch of languages and let's see what happens? and so i was one of the initial translators that was hired. um, for this reason, um, and funny enough, i joined, and you know my boss who, uh, blessed his heart, was a content marketer and a very good marketing buy, but knew nothing about localization. he was like: okay, so when are you gonna start publishing your first post in italian? and i was like, well, when we have a homepage in italian, because there's nothing in italian, so where am i gonna put these beautiful blog posts that i'm translating? so they're like, oh, right, right, think about that. so i started translating the home page too and bringing a low level of localization at the beginning, and, at the same time, the team that i belong to, so my colleagues and i, you know, my spanish colleague and my french colleague, my brazilian, portuguese colleague. well, we were all setting up our systems and processes and tools in a very scrappy start-up type of way. we got yelled at by our it departments more than once. we were doing things that apparently we were not supposed to do. you know, we were like: but we need cattles and cats don't run on on apples. so we're, we just downloaded the version of vmware and now we're running parallel systems and everybody's freaking out in security and we don't know why we're being yelled at. anyway, as an ops guy like my, blood pressure is raising just hearing you tok about that myself. you know, if i could go back to those days, i would do it exactly the same. it was the best days. it was, it was fantastik, it was great. it's fun. you know, a lot of us got our start in localization, basically being thrown to the wolves and, yeah, man, it sucked at the time, but i am so grateful i have a similar background, um, myself. so, ronaldo, let's hear from you. tell us a little bit about yourself. tell us a bit about what is transcreation- this fancy word that you used earlier- and, um, about shopify. it's really quick. let me introduce you really quick. let me do a better job. here is like this whole idea for this room came across because ronaldo posted something on linkedin that was all about shopify localization and i, liz and i were toking at the time and she's like, hey, let's make this the subject of this next weekly thing. so, ronaldo, you're to blame for this. i am, i am sorry, i don't think. i don't think. he mine. yeah, what can i tell about myself? so, um, i'm not really a translator. so i have a background in advertising as a copywriter. i have been a copywriter at leo burnett and publicis and some of like these advertising agencies. that was just before, basically, the internet broke the whole madman era. so i was, i was part of that era a little bit just at the end. so we did still smoke in the office. you know that was a good time, were the days right? and then, like after almost 10 years, i kind of needed a break from advertising. so an advertising break. i went on a trip through mexico for three months and then when i came back, it was the financial crisis and i needed to wait for my next copywriter assignment job and so i didn't really know what to do. and i had a friend who was working in a institute for entrepreneurs and they had a fair booth at the fair and he asked me if i could help, you know, like, hand out flyers, something like that, and i did that. and then i connected to the boss of this institute and basically asked me, what are you doing? and i said i'm a copywriter, i write stuff for advertising. and then he hired me as a freelance writer. to you know, rewrite the website of this institute for entrepreneurs. and i found it really interesting, this whole entrepreneur thing. i booked a business plan workshop- to you know, just do a research and dive into the topic. and then i was in this room with 20 other peoples and everyone had an idea for a new business and i thought, man, this is really cool, i want to do this too. so i tried to find an idea for a business myself, and i think the first idea was to have an online store that sells socks made by grandmothers- all right. so the idea was to, like you know, you could design onl.

Inside Shopify UX S2 EP08 | Bridging culture in design

welcome to inside shopify ux. as always, i'm your host, lalala lajo pearson, ux director at shopify. in this episode, i speak with aditi kolkani and farai matsima about our common traits as rich people who were raised in one culture and lead design in another. aditi and ferrai are ux managers at shopify and leaders in the broader design community. we tok about designing for different cultures and why designers need to evolve their idea of good design beyond a western-centric point of view. enjoy, i have to say, i'm actually on a podcast with celebrities in their own right. um, so i'm gonna, instead of just toking about your shopify jobs, i would love for you to introduce yourselves, but tell us about the things you don't do at shopify that make you famous. and aditi, the queen of singapore, i'm going to start with you. [Music]. uh, i don't think i'm that famous, but but yeah, i'm. i'm involved in the com, the design community in singapore and in bangalore. um, i guess i'm traditionally from startup land. i've worked in a lot of startups- uh, many, many startups- and shopify is actually one of the first big companies that i worked at. so, um, that's a bit about me. and, yeah, i love being modest. yeah, i, i am being modest. i have. so no, because i have literally had people say to me like, do you know who a dt is? like, everyone in singapore knows a dt. a dt is ux in singapore. so it's a bit more than just being involved in the community, i think. yeah, i think i've been very lucky to be, uh, welcomed by the community here. like it's it's six, seven years and um, kovid has definitely put a dampener on things, but we've sort of got through it and there are a lot of digital events and um, it's been really nice to build that and be part of that um community. yeah, so that's something. you're also like a shopify's. you know one woman hiring machine for apac region. like i feel like most of the people we brought in have come in via a dtt. yeah, yeah, i was one of the first ux people in asia pack and we've hired ux from scratch um in the region. so now we have designers in japan, in australia, in south korea, in singapore, um, so that's right. international. oh yeah, mate, listen, we've upgraded, we've upgraded, put it that way. okay, we'll, we'll come back and tok about apac. but then, yeah, farai, please tell us who are you and why are you famous? um, moderately famous, should i say, um, okay, in a localized region, so so, um, so i've spent. originally, i'm from zimbabwe, um, and i left there, thought i was gonna be a doctor. i didn't get the grades, lived in the uk for a bit, um, but i left the uk and i went to south africa. and when i went to south africa, um, one of the things i saw was that there was no places for people to learn about design, um, and people were largely self-taught. and so we started, after attending like a jared spool event in boston somewhere, i was like we could do this here in johannesburg. so, um, my wife and i started, uh pixel up, which is, uh, initially we were just doing meetups, and then we started doing, uh conferences where we were flying people from places like shopify, your facebook's, your googles- and bringing them to south africa- either cape town or johannesburg, um, so that we can kind of build a bridge between people who are looking to learn this thing and have no good way to learn it and people who have thoughts to share. and that's how you and i'm it low, um, we, we brought you over from from the uk and you know, you came to hang out with us and, and so we ran that from 2016 up to 2019, um, and then i moved to canada in 2017, so we did like two while living in another country, which was pretty hectik, but a djs you were saying like covert, has made things really difficult, um to you know, to get people to hang out. south africa has been partikularly strongly hit, and so it's just trying to figure out cool, what can we do to kind of keep that bridge, um, and keep that vibe going. so we'll figure out how that works. but, uh, that is my, uh, that is my claim to fame, though. okay, so clearly, modesty seems to be the same for two of i'm thinking it's cultural. let's tok about this. let's do things. tell me. i would say that he did this. tok um called one of a kind or being one of a kind- i can't remember the exact title, but it's something that i watched um a few years ago and it totally changed my perspective, like i think it gave me vocabulary to tok about stuff that i just didn't have before. so that's how i found out about pari before i came to shopify. so he is definitely famous well, so this is the thing. so i i think that tok is also linked to the other tok that you went to, um, i think you spoke at a conference in canada. you spoke at a conference in france about the like- building teams with cultural sensitivity, and i think this- and this is the crux of the conversation- right, because the commonality we share is we have often been minority leaders, right, so we come from a culture leading teams that come from a different culture to us and actually it ends up meaning that, like, bridging culture in design is a part of our job, whether we want it to be or not. like it's just an innate thing that we have to do. we have to understand, and i think you've just both been really good at connecting the dots on that, and i think you know dtu and i had a great conversation a year ago about how would we- you and i- evaluate a mandarin website? yeah, right, because who the hell says that we know how to do that? like, just because it doesn't look anything like in english, does that mean it's unusable? is it breaking any design patterns? does it have any like flaws? it's like, actually, you can't. you know there are limitations to this concept of universal design or what is considered good in one culture versus another, and i want to ask, like, how does that still show up? because a lot of the people you work with are obviously in apac, but you're also designing not just for the asia- pacific region but for the globe, right? so how does that still show up in, you know, design crits, how you look at design, how people, the sensibilities that they bring to their work. i think it definitely brings in a lot of different perspectives. i think my uh perspective is more like i'm almost like a bridge, like i can speak to multiple cultures, and it's easy for me to do that, or it it always has been um, and then it gives me the ability to provide a space for people of different voices to like give their design opinions and that perspective, however different they are. so i think it gives me that ability. um, i think we can definitely create these pieces where people give different kinds of perspectives and feedback. um, when we were studying design in india, we studied bauhaus, you know, and there were a lot of people who came to school who came from really like local cultural aesthetiks and had very strong opinions about their cultural aesthetiks. but that was sort of discouraged um, and i think at that time i didn't really care much about that or like think about it. but i think in hindsight you start to connect those dots and you start to think, okay, how can you make sure that next time, when somebody comes with a different perspective, you say, hey, this is interesting too, like how can we learn from this? and i think curiosity is important. it's so funny this. this came up in the conversation i had with toby, our ceo, because, um, we, we toked about bauhaus and that movement, but the fact that it's like for me it's always just been boring, like- i know that's super controversial to say like it's story, but i'm nigerian- like the definition of good is like four colors together, right, like the re, and i can imagine the same with indian culture- like the richness of society and what is considered good and livid and vivid. bauhaus is the opposite of that as a design aesthetik. you know so that tension and, i don't know, maybe unpopular opinions, so check me on this- but i think most of us have had to learn to be good at cultivating a design aesthetik that is western, white, western, northern hemisphere oriented. but white, western, northern hemisphere oriented designers would not be as su.

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A Remote Working Culture - Shopify: Creativity at Scale

[Applause]. how do you think remote work could impact skating culture? yeah, so there's a couple of things there, and one is definitely around the tools. uh, and we've seen, i'd say you know well, for a long time now. but you know, let's just say, in the last decade or so, there's been a lot, of, a lot of tiknology developed to help people work remotely. and when i was at ibm, for example, you know, we ran global projects with hundreds of people across the world and in all different time zones, and it, you know, had a lot of challenges, uh, for sure, um, but the way we made it work is because we had tools. in fact, one of the projects i was working on there was actually developing tools to help companies do that. so that was actually what we were developing, so we were using the stuff ourselves. so having the tools is really, um, helpful uh, and i think, necessary now. uh, and, of course, what we've seen now with the since the pandemic is that, uh, everyone is going crazy now trying to like for the companies that weren't already there, they're now having to figure out, okay, what do we need and how do we use it, and then the other thing is the whole culture around. um, i think it's the trust factor, right, like a lot of organizations never wanted to allow people to work remotely or to work at home, because i don't trust that people are, you know, actually working right. and yeah, in the end, the only thing that really matters is the impact you're having and and the success that you're having or not having. it doesn't really matter how much you know what hours you're putting in, so forth. i mean, obviously there's a, there's a sort of a core, um, a core responsibility that you have to be there for your team to interact with your team at certain hours and and so forth. but apart from that, uh, the only thing that really matters is is the results that that you're gaining in. so that's a pretty hard thing for some organizations to to take that step if they've been sort of stuck in the past. now, what's been interesting? of course, now they've been forced to do it. they've, you know there's there's been no choice about it, and so now people are working at home, and now they're they've had to make this jump, and now what's going to be interesting is that at some point there will be the option that they could, in theory, go back to the office. right, but will that really happen? because there are clearly benefits and i think in some cases now, organizations have seen: oh, we didn't think this was going to work, but it actually does work. and what about when you have a company like shopify, for example, which growing very quickly, fantastik product platform, customer service and will continually have, like you said, so many different jobs to be done for the consumer and so many different, more potential product lines or product areas? how do you really maintain a culture of innovation, experimentation, when you have so many different product lines to go into or opportunities? yeah, i think one of the things that's interesting for a company like that is trying to figure out at what point they actually stop right, like going back to this scaling issue. so here's the thing that i think that's interesting. like in business, we always tok about growth. that's what everybody wants. everybody wants their startup to be like this huge success and that they have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions- you know whatever- of people and customers and dollars and so forth. right, but what's the point at which it's actually not a good thing? and now, of course, some organizations start to do things like: okay, well, let's spin it off into a separate company, right. and there's been all these experiments that have taken place in some organizations with, okay, let's spin it out, let's spin it back in, right, let's bring it back in. so i think for a lot of these organizations, it's going to be figuring out when to actually stop and say, actually, you know what this is actually like. we're actually starting to go in a way that's actually not not not helping us, and so, in a way, it's great, it's exciting to to grow, but it's not necessarily a good thing, and i think, even culturally- and this is nothing specific to to shopify- but, like every company, every small company, as they grow, um, things will change, right. and for some people, uh, those changes are positive and some, for some people, then, they, they're not right. so some people will leave an organization just because you know what it's not. it's not that it, it's just not for me, right. like i, i was happy working at a small company. i'm not as happy now working in a larger company. i like working at small companies or i like working in smaller teams, right. so some people are always going to leave because of of that kind of a situation.

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Frontiers by Slack 2017 - Shopify Hones Its Engineering Culture w/ Internal Integrations

- Hi everyone. my name is Sachin Ranchod. I work on the developer relations team at Slack. As part of my role, I help our customers build and adapt internal integrations. For those of you who don't know that term, internal integration is simply a Slack app that you build for yourself, for your team, as opposed to something that you install and configure from the app directory. Internal integrations are a great way to integrate your custom internal tools into Slack, And we're even seeing customers use them to combine multiple systems together behind a single interface and Slack to support more complex work flows. Today, we're going to have John Arthorne from Shopify's production engineering team join us to tok about how they use an internal integration to give their engineers super powers. For context, the production engineering team at Shopify is responsible for really driving their DevOps culture. They are the team that builds and maintains the infrastructure that Shopify runs on. They're also the team that is responsible for creating the developer tools that lets the engineering team take advantage of that infrastructure to get the code into production and then look after it once it's there. For those of who haven't used Shopify, they are a platform to help you manage and build and manage your ecommerce store. In fact, they have over 500 thousand ecommerce stores running on their platform. today. Shopify helps these companies by supporting them with website builder, payment processing, tiknology, inventory management systems, analytiks, hosting- you name it- they've got it if you need to run an ecommerce store. I've been a big fan of Shopify's engineering team for many years, Back when I was learning Ruby on Rails. they were an incredible resource, thanks to all their open source contributions and their willingness to just share and teach others. It's always a pleasure to have their team come up and do toks at conferences, because they're always continuously improving their tooling and culture and there's lots of opportunities for everyone to learn from them. In today's session, we're going to be toking about how Shopify uses Slack as a shared interface to their production engineering tools. By building an internal integration that ties together multiple systems across their deployment and incident management tools, they're able to make the engineers' lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. Their internal integration, Spy, helps increase visibility and accountability across the engineering organization, which, in turn, helps with everything from training and onboarding to their ability to resolve incidents much faster. Regardless if you're a public company like Shopify or just working on a side project, I think we all have something that we can learn from today's session. So please join me in welcoming John Arthorne to the stage. (clapping) - Okay, welcome everyone. So just to warn you, I was trapped on a runway for three hours over night last night, so I'm a little bit tired. so if I start to sleepwalk or wander around, please throw something at me or something like that to keep me back on track. Like Sachin said, I'm going to tok about this internal integration we built at Shopify called Spy. But before I get into much detail, I want to just take a little step back and explain some of the context around why we built what we did. Going back about four years ago, Shopify was a fairly small, privately held startup, mostly located. we had about 250 employees, almost all located in a single office in Ottawa, Canada, And we're a small enough organization where, if we had a new idea to get across, some new tiknology we wanted to introduce or decision we need to be made, it was pretty easy to just get everyone together in one room and quickly share that context and work through an issue or explain something or make a decision. As we move forward, we found we really like this idea of having this shared operations room where we could do these things. So the next year we grew again by, we doubled in size and we opened a new headquarters in Ottawa and we built this dedicated operations room that you see in this picture. and again, the idea here was: let's have this one room where, if there's something really important going on, some high stakes kind of situation, we can bring everyone together in one room. So it's kinda had these tiered seating looking down on a huge monitor wall where we can see monitoring from different tools and kinda see everything in one place. So this was great. We really liked it. It worked really well at a certain scale. But then as we moved forward again, going forward to this year- we're about 2,500 employees, we're across six offices. this idea of having everyone together in a single room seems kind of quaint. now We love the idea, but the actual tiknology of a physical space for doing it wasn't working for us. So what we did was we solved this through building an internal integration in Slack that brought together all this context and created a virtual operations room where we can have the same effect but in a much more scalable way. So we built this integration called Spy. I'm just going to give you a quick overview of the architecture. So Spy is a Ruby application written using the Lita bot framework. So it runs as a application in our data center. We actually have about ten instances that run in parallel load balance so they can handle the load, and then we have another data center where we have a backup instance where we can switch over to if we need to. So we have this application running at our data center. It connects into all sorts of other internal tools that we have in the company and it also connects out to various third party APIs. So there's about a dozen different third party APIs that this tool reaches out to. It's able to pull together information from all of these different places and then on the front end we have a bot user in Slack that teams can interact with through commands which go through to this back end. So that's just a quick overview of the architecture And again, this is something we arrived at after a couple of years. so if you're starting out, this might seem a little bit complicated, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. So I want to give you walk through a few. I've got about three and a half examples that we're gonna walk through just to give you a better idea of the kinds of work flows we use it for and where we find it really shines. The first one I'm going to tok about is situational awareness for doing deployment. So Shopify at this core application deploys on a continuous delivery cadence. So there's about 200 changes going into production a day and we do about 50 releases per day to get those changes out. so it's a very fast moving environment. there's lots of developers involved and we find Spy helps us to coordinate that by giving everyone the right information they need at the right time. So if I'm a developer who has a change ready to release and I want it pushed to production, Spy will send me direct messages to let me know: hey, the automation is about to go. deploy your change, Be ready. Here's a link to the logs. there's a log that you can roll back or board if you need to. So it just tells every developer who's partikipating this: deploy, be ready. Your change is about to go out And five minutes later or so your change has been deployed into production. It sends you another message saying: hey, your change has been released. Now is a good time to validate it. If something's broken, here's what to do to get some help. So it just gives the developer the information they need when they need it. And then we go into our shared operations channel where we have all the developers are in this channel and they can see a similar notification that goes out saying: here are deployment to production is happening. Here's the set of commits that are contained in it, with links to. you can link to the straight to th.

Spotify Engineering Culture (by Henrik Kniberg)

[Music]. one of the big success factors here at Spotify is our agile engineering culture. culture tends to be invisible. we don't notike it because it's there all the time, kind of like the air we breathe. but if everyone understands the culture, we're more likely to be able to keep it and even strengthen it as we grow. so that's the purpose of this video. when our first music player was launched in 2008, we were pretty much a scrum company. scrum is a well-established agile development approach and it gave us a nice team-based culture. however, a few years later, we had grown into a bunch of teams and found that some of the standard scrum practikes were actually getting in the way. so we decided to make all this. optional. rules are good start, but then break them when needed. we decided that agile matters more than scrum and agile principles matter more than any specific practikes. so we renamed the scrum master role to agile coach, because we wanted servant leaders more than process masters. we also started using the term squad instead of scrum team, and our key driving force became autonomy. so what is an autonomous squad? a squad is a small, cross-functional, self-organizing team, usually less than eight people. they sit together and they have end-to-end responsibility for the stuff they build, design, commit, deploy, maintenance, operations- the whole thing. each squad has a long-term mission, such as make Spotify the best place to discover music, or internal stuff like infrastructure for a be testing. autonomy basically means that the squad decides what to build, how to build it and how to work together while doing it. there are, of course, some boundaries to this, such as the squad mission, the overall product strategy for whatever area they are working on, and short term goals that are renegotiated every quarter. our office is optimized for collaboration. here's a typical squad area. the squad members work closely together here, with adjustable desks and easy access to each other screens. they gather over here in the lounge for things like planning sessions and retrospectives, and back there is a huddle room for smaller meetings or just get some quiet time. almost all walls are whiteboards. so why is autonomy so important? well, because it's motivating, and motivated people build better stuff. also, autonomy makes us fast by letting decisions happen locally in the squad instead of the a bunch of managers and committees and stuff. it helps us minimize handoffs in waiting so we can scale without getting bogged down with dependencies and coordination. although each squad has its own mission, they need to be aligned with product strategy, company priorities and other squads- basically be a good citizen in the Spotify ecosystem. Spotify is overall mission is more important than any individual squad. so the key principle is really be autonomous but don't sub optimize. it's kind of like a jazz band, although each musician is autonomous and plays his own instrument and listen to each other and focus on the whole song together. that's how great music is created. so our goal is loosely coupled but tightly aligned squads. we're not all there yet, but we experiment a lot with different ways of getting closer. in fact, that applies to most things in this video. this culture description is really a mix of what we are today and what we are trying to become in the future. alignment and autonomy may seem like different ends of a scale, as in, more autonomy equals less alignment. however, we think of it more like two different dimensions. down here is low alignment and low autonomy. a micro management culture, no high level purpose, just shut up and follow orders. up here is high alignment, but still low autonomy. so leaders are good at communicating what problem needs to be solved, but they're also telling people how to solve it. high alignment and high autonomy means leaders focus on what problem dissolves, but let the teams figure out how to solve it. what about down here them? low alignment and high autonomy means teams do whatever they want and basically all run in different directions. leaders are helpless and our product becomes a Frankenstein. we're trying hard to be up here aligned autonomy and we keep experimenting with different ways of doing that. so alignment enables autonomy. the stronger alignment we have, the more autonomy we can afford to grant. that means the leaders job is to communicate what problem needs to be solved and why, and the squad's collaborate with each other to find the best solution. one consequence of autonomy is that we have very little standardization. when people ask things like which code editor do you use or how do you plan, the answer is: mostly depends on which squad. some do scrum sprints, others do Kanban. some estimate stories and measure velocity, others don't. it's really up to each squad. instead of formal standards, we have a strong culture of cross-pollination. when enough squads use a specific practike or tool, such as get, that becomes the path of least resistance and other squads tend to pick the same tool. squads start supporting that tool and helping each other and it becomes like a de facto standard. this informal approach gives us a healthy balance between consistency and flexibility. our architecture is based on over a hundred separate systems coded and deployed independently. there's plenty of interaction, but each system focuses on one specific need, such as playlist management, search or monitoring. we try to keep them small and decoupled with clear interfaces and protokols. tiknically, each system is owned by one squad. in fact, most quads owns several. but we have an internal open source model and our culture is more about sharing than owning. supposed squad one here needs something done in system B and squad two knows that code best. they'll typically ask squad two to do it. however, if squad two doesn't have time or they have other priorities, then squad one doesn't necessarily need to wait. we hate waiting. instead, they are welcome to go ahead and edit the code themselves and then ask squad two to review the changes. so anyone can edit any code. but we have a culture of peer code review. this improves quality and, more importantly, spreads knowledge. over time. we've evolved design guidelines, code standards and other things to reduce engineering frictions, but only when badly needed. so, on a scale from authoritative to liberal, we're definitely more on the liberal side now. none of this would work if it wasn't for the people. we have a really strong culture of mutual respect. I keep hearing comments like: my colleagues are awesome. people often give credit to each other for great work and seldom take credit for themselves. considering how much talent we have here, there is surprisingly little Eagle. one big aha for new hires is that autonomy is kind of scary at first. you and your squad mates are expected to find your own solution. no one will tell you what to do, but it turns out. if you ask for help, you get lots of it, and fast. there's genuine respect for the fact that we're all in this boat together and need to help each other succeed. we focus a lot on motivation. here is the example: an actual email from the head of people operations. hi everyone. our employee satisfaction survey says 91% enjoy working here and 4% don't. now that may seem like a pretty high satisfaction rate, especially considering our growth pane. from 2006 to 2013, we've doubled every year and now have over 1200 people. but then he continues. this is, of course, not satisfactory and we want to fix it. if you're one of those unhappy 4%, please contact us. we're here for your sake and nothing else. so good enough isn't good enough. half a year later, things had improved and satisfaction rate was up to 94%. with this strong focus on motivation, it's no coincidence that we have such an awesome reputation as workplace. nevertheless, we do have plenty of problems to deal with, so we need to keep improving. okay, so we have over 50 squads spread across four cities. some kind of structure is needed. current.

Shopify SLAMS "Woke" Culture?! Shopify CEO Says Company is APOLITICAL!

[Applause]. [Music]. hey guys, welcome back to clownfish tv. this is neon. i am here with geeky sparkles, hello, and we're going to tok about how shopify- you know, the big shopping app- how they have made a statement saying that they really don't want to get into politiks, and we know that silicon valley companies, other silicon valley companies, have tried this- tik companies- and they've gotten all kinds of blow back from employees. we're going to tok about the shopify kind of anti-woke policy that they instituted and kind of point out that you know what they really, uh, didn't, didn't take their own advice a couple of months ago. no, so we'll see where it's going, uh, but already people are sort of like: you know, tik companies have to take a side. they have to take. no, they don't. that's what i'm tired of hearing. companies don't owe you anything. they don't. and actually it's really stupid of companies- unless that's what they're, they're, they're, you know- they're deliberately pandering to a certain, a politikal side. it's really really stupid of companies take a politikal stand, and i'm so tired of it. i'm tired of people like twitter and all this [ __ ] demanding that everybody take a side. it has to be their side too. it's like for [ __ ] sake. you know what? america's been around for centuries: america, no problem voting for stuff before five years ago. uh, all history began five years ago. so we're going to tok about this and just this trend that we're seeing this uh uh pendulum swing. we've got companies that went super ultra woke and then they, they lost business. and then we had other companies say, hey, we're not going to do that, and then they lost business. they've lost business, or their employees had a [ __ ] fit. the employees had a [ __ ] fit. we're going to tok about that. there's this artikle out there saying that companies are trying to run away from the politiks, but the politiks are finding them. yeah, because they're not going to let you, because twitter won't allow it, because a bunch of these kids that just showed up now are suddenly because the world revolves around them, don't you know? right, right. so before we get into it any further, please subscribe for more pop culture, news, views and rants. guys, we're over 191. uh, there we go. woohoo, we didn't have a woohoo in the last one. yes, sorry, i was cleaning the studio. yeah, she was cleaning the studio. that was what she was. that was my choice. before it was like, oh, you make her clean now, it was my choice and i'm actually faster and better at it. so she is. she is better at cleaning than i am, so, yeah, that sounds bad, but it's not because he makes me. no, i don't make her. she's like this place. he's better cooking than i am, so, hey, so i will get my [ __ ] ass in the kitchen and make you some pie, you make me some chicken, and that's okay. or steak steak, maybe tonight. anyway, steaks are good. yeah, all right. so we're gonna tok about shopify. i don't know if you can buy steaks on shopify, but uh, yeah, major tik ceo speaks out against woke capitalism. now just a reminder: shopify did get politikal at the beginning of the year. they they took down the trump store, i guess. yeah, i wasn't aware of any of this. yeah, so, and people were, were pretty upset. now they're coming around and saying, hey, we're not gonna get politikal. i mean, i think that every, every company has, has limits as to what they will and will not do. i don't know if they felt like the employees were pressuring them to take down the trump story, what the deal is, but what media was, or whatever. yeah, yeah, so anyway, they're canadian, um, you know, so they're probably like we don't want to deal with your, but then they're canadian. whatever you want to deal with your us politiks anyway, you know, i'm just so tired of it. i'm tired of the fact that other countries, everything has to revolve around, you know, like you know us, us politiks, i mean, and it's really stupid. and i understand canada has their own set of issues and stuff. i got a lot of you're canadian um, so i'm sure you have similar, i know you have similar issues going on there, but like they keep trying to paint the world with their broad brush, like they keep trying to push american politiks and countries that are, like you know, clear across the globe from us and have nothing to do with our politiks. zimbabwe doesn't give a [ __ ] about maga hats, that's right, you know, i'm just confirmed. i'm just tired of this. it's like stop trying to to make everyone conform to your politikal agenda, and only on one side of it, in the united states. this is stupid. you sound like a bunch of colonizers expecting everybody to get on board with your american politiks anyway. um, here we go. this is coming from uh foundation for economic education. put this out. we're going to tok about because there there are some artikles going around saying that you're not allowed to walk away from politiks. well, [ __ ]. you're not allowed to walk away from politiks. uh, so major tik ceo speaks out against vote capitalism. here's hoping more ceos follow shopify's lead and rediscover the fundamental morality of free market capitalism. i don't care if i'm buying a t-shirt. i don't really give a flying fart what your politikal affiliation is and what every employee you have as a politikal affiliation is. i don't make you take a test before i buy a shirt. so business insider reported that the ceo of the e-commerce platform shopify, which is, i believe, the largest independent, in fact we're going to be opening, uh, our own shop- clownfish, we know, but just because we're trying to stay out of politiks. well, we were going to use shopify anyways, right, but i'm just saying that actually makes me want to open it more. um, so toby lutky- i don't know how to pronounce his name- recently sent a letter to the entire staff reasserting the company reasserting. so they already knew this, yeah, and they actually toked to on the podcast. i guess they toked to their. they actually have a diversity and inclusion person there who's like this is nothing new. this has been our policy pretty much since day one, um, reasserting the company's commitment to competitive enterprise and rejecting calls for it to embrace social activism. in an age when politiks are increasingly infecting corporate america, is he wanted to remind everyone that we are a business and, more importantly, a hugely ambitious one? we are trying to create a world class product that gives super powers to the merchants we're obsessed over. everything shopify does is to accomplish this, and everyone at shopify should be able to describe how their job, through a series of direct or indirect steps, furthers the mission. they're focused on making sure creators can make money and therefore they can make money. and if you want to sell your, your politikal shirts or whatever on there, and that's you're, you're, oh, that's fine, but their own internally they're like we're not taking sides here, because if we run out of money, guess what? we were also run out of jobs. and how smart is it to be? you know, take about. so the social activism was most social activism against corporate america, that is. that is the uh, the elephant in the room, right, because, because a lot of activists now are anti-capitalists, it's very hard to work for a company that wants to make a profit when so many of your employees actively want to destroy all. you know that companies, especially small businesses, aren't allowed to make a profit because that's not fair to them, it's problematik, and and they aren't getting paid, and while the boss makes more money than them for the company they spent years building up before they showed up, like a year ago- um, how you know how very dare they. they have health insurance and they don't, et cetera, et cetera. welcome to reality. it's been this way for a long time, before 2016.. shopify- oh, this is gonna get me in trouble. shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family, he continues. this is like normal corporate. at least he's being honest. the very idea is preposterous. you're born into a family, you never choose it and they can't unfamily y.