Product Growth Lessons from Facebook, Shopify, and Rogers
Last week, Taplytics hosted an intimate, invite only event with product leaders from across all industries in Toronto. Here’s what we learned.
Digital directors, chief product officers, and heads of product came together last week to discuss the challenges and opportunities they find with the ever-changing technical landscape and the future of mobile growth.
The highlight of the night was a panel featuring Mike Shaver, the former Director of Engineering at Facebook, Ryan Chong, the Product Owner at Rogers, and Brandon Chu, the Director of Product at Shopify.
The differences between companies like Rogers and Shopify (Rogers being incorporated in 1925 and Shopify in 2004) created an informative and interesting conversation surrounding different organizations and their approach to mobile growth.
The highlights from the discussion were the three unique opinions on how omnichannel experiences, design thinking, customer feedback, innovation and bias all play a part in each organization’s growth, team and role in the future of mobile.
From Desktop, to Mobile, to AI and Machine Learning
Facebook transformed from ‘mobile maybe’ to ‘mobile first’ to ‘mobile always’ to ‘mobile only’ — Mike Shaver
It’s hard to navigate between mobile, web, and recent AI and machine learning innovations. All three companies are working on making mobile the main experience for users — meaning they can do everything on a desktop computer on a phone. For Shopify, that means creating and running an entire business on your phone. For Facebook, that means having the exact same experience on web as mobile, or, as Mike put it ‘mobile everything’.
Customer Centered Design
‘Build empathy organically and systematically’ — Brandon Chu
All three companies see extreme value in thinking like your customer, and empathizing with their pain points to create a successful product that people want and need to use. Ryan from Rogers believes all decisions should be based on research, and encourages his team to actually go into stores and watch how their customers are interacting with the product. Shopify takes the ‘think like a customer’ mentality to another level by actually giving all employees free access to Shopify’s marketplace. Out of the 3200 employees, about 20% are actually currently running a Shopify business on the side to get the full customer experience. Shopify also encourages its employees to jump on a customer support call at any time to hear customers problems firsthand. Their whole office culture is centred around the entrepreneurism they are bringing out in their customers.
‘Work towards improving the experience for the largest group in the largest way.’ — Mike Shaver
Facebook’s biggest focus is to make design feedback quantitative. For example, scraping the apple store for customer reviews. Facebook constantly questions what entry points customers use, what menus customers look through, and how they navigate the website. Their product team uses this data to create a better product.
Failure in Innovation
‘Innovation is really hard and painful, it’s really slow, and it mostly fails. SO, you should all go out and do it’. — Mike Shaver
Mike and Brandon questioned if failure should be encouraged. There was definitely agreement on the importance of experimentation with tools like Taplytics for A/B testing. Brandon emphasized the importance of being willing to fail- own it don’t just talk it. Shopify builds for entrepreneurs and rewards teams for being as entrepreneurial as possible. It aims to frame experiments as questions, not assertions. This encourages employees to be honest about what happens. Mike stressed that disseminating information is essential — have meetings.
“If you can’t measure it, don’t bother building it” — Ryan Chong
Ryan explained the importance of having a huge culture shift at large organizations- employees should ask why and not be afraid, and constantly be encouraged to be curious and to try different things.
The Importance of a Diverse Workplace
“Hire a team that reflects your customer base” — Brandon Chu
An audience member asked an important question to the panelists: “How do these large organizations handle bias, specifically in their workplace hiring measures?” There’s no secret that there really is no way to eliminate your bias, all three of our panelists agreed you have to be aware of bias and plan ways to tackle the issue. Mike specifically saw a huge issue with the lack of workplace diversity in tech because it means less talented employees. He also explained machine learning will not help eliminate biases, but rather enhances them. Ryan emphasized that it is important to hire people from all backgrounds, not just culturally but different career backgrounds.
From Startup to Giant Enterprise
“Get shit done”- Brandon Chu
Shopify has exploded recently growing into a 3000+ employee company. How do they do it? Their mantra is ‘get shit done’, which is the first thing they teach people in onboarding. Shopify hires people that want to create impact on customers and only celebrates those milestones. Mike believes the biggest barrier with a growing team is trust. This means encouraging initiatives like following what other groups do and welcoming others in team meetings — transparency is key.
The Future
“We have to navigate an interesting balance between platform independent experiences, and platform optimized interfaces to those experiences” — Mike Shaver
The big question of the night was what the future holds. Mike, Brandon, and Ryan agree there is no doubt we are getting new platforms faster and faster. They also agree this means focusing on core values, not constantly adapting to the newest technology. The focus should be on platform independent experiences. The difference between banking with a headset on at a desktop computer vs. doing it on your phone waiting on the subway is huge, designers have to work on making the best possible experience for the specific platform. Brandon suggested that with the changing times, it’s important to learn, but not to commit to new technology until it becomes necessary.
Overall, we learned that no matter what the size or age of a company — Shopify, Facebook, or Rogers — they all face similar problems and see many of the same opportunities with the future of mobile. Machine learning and AI are not just buzzwords, but important considerations when deciding how to develop new user experiences. It’s important to focus on your core values, think like your customer, be ready to adapt, and hire a diverse set of employees that have the same passion for success you do.
Taplytics is a product experimentation solution committed to helping teams build digital products for their users and get the most out of their technology budget. By encouraging companies to execute, listen then iterate, Taplytics helps them validate product decisions with live user data to prove that they are making a positive impact.
