Conversations: Alain Lormil

This is our second in a series of conversations with product managers and leads at Shopify. Through the series, we hope to demystify the product management craft at Shopify, and share a little bit about ourselves. We sat down with Alain Lormil, to learn more about his role and perspectives as a product manager on the Security and Trust team.

What do you love about being a security Product Manager here at Shopify?

The main thing that I really enjoy is working with the Shopify team. Right now, cybersecurity is top of mind for many companies: data breaches, security problems, privacy, and information. So, getting to work on those types of projects is very exciting because I’m working to prevent these problems with the brilliant individuals I’ve met the past six months at Shopify. The challenges, especially during the pandemic, and being able to work for a company that helps to solve a lot of issues merchants are facing right now are my main motivators.

What’s something that you’ve always wanted to perfect?

Recently, it’s really about going back to the basics of PM. I’ve been working to identify my end customers since I work in a service line that’s internally facing. Luckily, Shopify is a big company and I can get in touch with many different individuals to offer my team’s services/products. With COVID, it is especially important to be able to reach out to teams that might need help from my particular service line and to learn how to resurface it in a remote setting.

With digital by default, I’ve had to learn to adapt to working remotely. It’s been especially difficult to facilitate cross-team coordination. But, in terms of information sharing, I feel more connected with the company. In a weird way, even though we’re distributed, I feel a bit more connected to what’s going on because we’re sharing information through a variety of mediums internally and I’m able to catch up on them on my own time asynchronously. Async communication can become a perk in this way.

Would you say that you are like a firefighter type of a PM? So, someone who comes in and is good at multitasking and putting out fires.

I would say in smaller companies, the reality and expectation is to be the jack of all trades. You would need to have a variety of skill sets, like technical, product, strategy, and marketing and be able switch gears quickly.

So, being able to touch everything and interact with a lot of people is rewarding. But I also find that you don’t need to be a firefighter to be a great PM. If you specialize in something and can offer expertise, you’ll be able to offer just as much value, if not more. At Shopify, I think we’re growing as a company and I think everyone needs to be good at multitasking and putting out fires.

What is your mental model for growing as a PM? What’s challenging you to grow?

I like to frame this around trust since it’s very specific to my role. Security is something that I had done briefly but never in-depth, so when working with engineers, I often ask them what types of conferences they attend, or what types of books they read to stay abreast. In terms of building out the “T” shape as a PM, I’m honing in on the depth aspect more because trust requires in-depth knowledge in various facets. I did have a technical background but not in security. So, some of the more general PM skills I carried from past career stints might not necessarily apply in the trust line.

One specific challenge that’s helping me grow as a PM is being one of the first PMs in this service line. Prior to me joining, this service line was mostly led by engineering teams, so I’m focussed on establishing trust with them in order to build a roadmap together as well as a strategy. Right now, it’s all about gathering context and understanding the history or background of initiatives we are excited to pursue as a team. Sometimes, I find it a bit difficult to form a proper opinion on an initiative or how to go about it. It helps to learn the backstory of decisions in the past that led to the initiative. So, a decision log is really important to have. Since I started at Shopify, I realized the company is very context-heavy and you have to invest time to understand the background and work with others on the team to learn from their knowledge.

What’s something that you want to change?

It’s a bit difficult now since we are working remotely, but one aspect I want to improve on is gathering the team together more socially. The team is very strong in terms of execution and technical skills but building a team mentality around a product team with a variety of disciplines is something that can be improved upon. Maybe having social hangouts or smaller group meetings. Through multiple years, we will tackle multiple challenges together, but really building a team is going to take some time and even now I’m not sure how to do it well.

Did you find it was easier to form these kinds of bonds when you worked at a startup where the company size was rather small? Are there any learnings you brought from that company over to Shopify?

At a glance, product management involves working with contributors, stakeholders or end users, but it also requires interacting with people from execs to marketing to customer success. You need to make sure you know how to communicate and the audience. When it’s a very technical audience, I’ll manage and drive the meetings a certain way. If I’m working with customer support or customer account integrity, for example, I’ll cater the meetings in a different way. Same thing when I’m dealing with UX or product. That part is very helpful in terms of getting information and making sure that everybody contributes and participates because the meetings are not the same depending on who the audience is.

How do you spend your time between listening and sharing your opinions?

I’m more of a listener. I like to take my time and think before giving my opinion. Since I’m still building my context on the product and Shopify, sometimes I do hesitate a bit. I would like to drive more to the point, to give my opinion first and then collect others’. But, right now I’m more of a listener and then I’ll share my point afterwards once I listen to others and we debate. It’s something I want to bring a bit more forward in my conversations.

When it comes to growth opportunities, how do you see that work within Shopify based on your experience so far? What is some advice you would give to someone who is starting out?

What’s great is with the scale of the company, there’s so many opportunities and even in my case, in the service line, there are no other product managers. They are starting to build out this particular product team, so I could see there’s a lot of opportunities there. Going from team to team and talking with other peers in product management, I see there is a vast range of products and opportunities from building financial tools and products to security. It is like there are many companies inside the company. That’s the biggest motivator, you can never run out of places to grow. The sky is almost the limit.

In your opinion, what do you think Shopify’s product philosophy is?

I think that the name of the framework Get Shit Done (GSD) really does apply as Shopify’s philosophy. Especially when COVID hit, there were a lot of pivots and looking at the amount of products that ended up being shipped, this really showed me what type of company Shopify is. The plethora of features that were released that were very topical to merchants really proved that and also showed the philosophy of working on the right things at the right time.

So, there you have it — Alain’s perspective on being a PM at Shopify and our product philosophy. If this post inspired you or if you’re interested in the cool things we’re doing at Shopify, join us! We’re hiring, in the digital by default world.