Brandon Chu
Brandon Chu is VP of Product at Shopify, where he leads the app platform ecosystem, new initiatives group, and M&A investments. Brandon helped scale Shopify’s PM team from five to hundreds, and worked his way up from an IC Senior PM. Prior to Shopify, he was a Director of PM at FreshBooks and, before that, a founder. Brandon might be best known for his writing on the art and science of product management as part of a collection on Medium he calls “The Black Box of Product Management.”.
AI & Technology Skills
PMs should demystify technology by building simple applications themselves to break down the 'wall of obscurity' between product and engineering.
"if you're not technical, really lean into it and build something simple, learn how to build something simple for yourself, demystify the technology. That experience will take you far. I love telling p..."
Platform PMing requires a shift in psychology to manage much longer feedback loops and indirect user impact.
"The cycles for platform work are five to 10 odd times longer. You're maybe changing something on the infrastructure level, then opening up an API and then doing an alpha period for the API where devel..."
Communication Skills
Writing is primarily a tool for the author to achieve clarity and refine mental models, with communication being a secondary benefit.
"It was the writing process itself that actually allowed me to solidify those mental models and those frameworks in my mind. And so I wasn't ahead of the game in any way. It was just I think I really w..."
External thought leadership can be a powerful tool for building internal credibility and aligning with senior executives.
"I actually found that writing externally and getting momentum externally was a better way to influence internally what was happening, to the effect that Tobi would read my post here and there and he'd..."
Remote-first companies should use short, high-intensity in-person 'bursts' to handle creative work that is difficult to do asynchronously.
"we've actually instituted with something we call bursts. So bursts at Shopify are the ability for your team generally maybe once a quarter or whatnot, to just come together to do really high velocity..."
Engineering Skills
A strong technical culture is built by requiring all functions to engage directly with the technical tools and workflows of the engineering team.
"When I joined, all project management was just in GitHub, just commenting on poll requests and even marketers in order to augment or upload a blog post, you'd have to commit and deploy it. So there wa..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Publicly documenting your philosophy and mental models acts as a passive onboarding system for future hires.
"one amazing, and just the context, I'm really old at Shopify now... people that would join my team already knew how I thought. It was pretty onboarded a lot of the PMs that would join my team because..."
Effective product cultures democratize product thinking across all departments rather than siloing it within the PM org.
"There's sort of an understanding of Shopify that everyone at the company from engineers to support, to sales, everyone's responsible for product thinking and it's not just the area for a small group o..."
Leadership Skills
High-level leadership requires the ability to make high-conviction decisions in the face of unsolvable ambiguity.
"know how to make really, really hard high conviction decisions that actually can't be solved. You got to take a leap of faith and how to do that and bring teams through that type of ambiguity and then..."
The most important part of decision-making is categorizing the importance and reversibility of the decision to manage your own cognitive load.
"the first thing it argues is that the most important thing to figure out when you're dealing with any decision is actually figuring out how important that decision is. Since we're faced with hundreds..."
Marketing Skills
Storytelling is a critical 'founder skill' that allows PMs to move beyond execution into high-level leadership.
"I think ultimately to have the highest trajectory and what certainly was a tailwind for my career was you guys have to lean into those founder skills. And so things like being a great storyteller, how..."
Product Management Skills
Annual planning should focus on high-level directional vision and outcomes rather than granular feature roadmaps.
"put forward a vision for what that team's going to accomplish that year, whether that is a directional change or even specific outcomes in some cases. And we spend time aligning with both Tobi, the re..."
In times of crisis or 'war time,' roadmaps must be radically simplified to focus only on mission-critical survival features.
"We went down from trying to ship maybe the 40 things that quarter to three and nothing else mattered. And that became the rhythm of the company for almost that entire year."