Thursday • 1hr 40min
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Key Takeaways
- Choose the harder path - Even if you fail, you'll learn valuable lessons and work with smart people
- Create intensity without burnout through:
- Weekly updates and 6-week review cycles
- Pair programming
- Demo culture and high-fidelity feedback
- Reducing distractions and meetings
- Pair programming is an underutilized management tool that increases learning, quality, and intensity
- Hiring philosophy: Focus on work trials and internships over traditional interviews
- Build infrastructure over features - Take time to build robust platforms that enable faster development long-term
- Delete code regularly to maintain simplicity and velocity
Introduction
Farhan Thawar is VP and Head of Engineering at Shopify, where he oversees more than 1,000 engineers building a platform that powers over 10% of U.S. e-commerce. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at Pivotal Labs and Xtreme Labs, and co-founder of Helpful.com. The conversation covers creating high-intensity engineering cultures, choosing harder paths, hiring practices, and building scalable organizations.
Topics Discussed
Choosing the Harder Path (5:42)
Farhan advocates for consistently choosing the more difficult option when faced with multiple paths, as it leads to better outcomes even if you fail:
- Learning opportunity - The harder path forces you to work with smart people and learn valuable skills
- Network building - You meet and build relationships with talented people taking on similar challenges
- Failure upside - Even if you fail, you gain experience and knowledge that's valuable
Creating Organizational Intensity (19:20)
Shopify maintains high velocity through several key practices:
- Weekly Updates (GSD - Get S**t Done)
- Teams share progress updates every week
- Creates natural pressure to show consistent progress
- Enables quick course corrections
- Six-Week Review Cycles
- Deep reviews of all projects with leadership
- Short enough to maintain context, long enough to show progress
- Drives accountability and alignment
- Demo Culture
- High-fidelity updates with working demos
- Enables quick, concrete feedback
- Identifies issues early
The Power of Pair Programming (22:06)
Farhan considers pair programming an underutilized management tool that drives quality and learning:
- Benefits:
- Higher code quality through real-time review
- Accelerated knowledge transfer
- Reduced distractions and higher focus
- Better solutions through collaboration
- Implementation at Shopify:
- 4-8 hours per week of pairing
- Used strategically for complex problems
- Remote pairing enabled through tools like Tuple
Meeting Management and Focus (37:18)
Shopify takes a radical approach to managing meetings and maintaining focus:
- Meeting Armageddon:
- Annual deletion of all recurring meetings
- Two-week moratorium on adding new recurring meetings
- Forces reevaluation of meeting necessity
- Results:
- IC engineers average 3 hours of meetings per week
- Managers average 6-7 hours per week
- Significant increase in focused work time
Code Deletion and Simplification (41:10)
Regular code deletion is a key practice at Shopify:
- Delete Code Club regularly removes 1M+ lines of code
- Benefits:
- Improved system performance
- Better maintainability
- Easier onboarding for new engineers
- Reduced complexity
Building Infrastructure vs Features (49:05)
Shopify categorizes work into three buckets:
- Experiments - Testing new ideas
- Features - Building on existing infrastructure
- Infrastructure - Creating foundational capabilities
Remote Work and Trust Battery (57:45)
Shopify maintains a "90% remote" culture with intentional in-person moments:
- Annual Shopify Summit brings entire company together
- "Bursts" - Small team gatherings for specific projects
- Trust Battery concept guides remote relationships
- Optional office access for those who want it
Hiring Philosophy (1:03:14)
Farhan takes an unconventional approach to hiring:
- Work trials over traditional interviews
- Life Story interviews to understand motivation and curiosity
- 90-day evaluation period for mutual fit assessment
- Large internship program as hiring pipeline
Internship Program (1:11:41)
Shopify is building the world's largest tech internship program:
- 1,000 interns planned for 2025
- Benefits:
- Extended work trials for potential hires
- Fresh perspectives from new generation
- Increased organizational energy
Conclusion
Farhan's approach to building high-performing engineering organizations centers on creating intensity through structured processes, embracing difficult challenges, and maintaining simplicity. His focus on pair programming, regular code deletion, and building robust infrastructure has helped Shopify maintain high velocity while scaling to over 10,000 employees. The company's innovative approaches to hiring, meetings, and remote work provide valuable lessons for other organizations looking to build effective engineering cultures.
