Tobi Lutke

Major technical architecture shifts are strategic business decisions that impact how a company builds and scales.

"Monorepo, now for companies, it's a very much one of those door A, door B kind of things. It's a very consequential choice that is incorrect to go say yes to at a certain size, and then it becomes ver..."

Resolve stakeholder conflict by identifying the specific unstated foundational assumptions where parties diverge.

"When someone disagrees with me, I tend to immediately stop and say, 'Cool, let's figure out why there's disagreement.'... What I'm looking for is offer unstated foundational assumptions. What is our d..."

Product quality is a direct downstream result of a team's genuine care and emotional investment in the work.

"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the product. And it is not possible to make great products..."

High-standard feedback should be based on a person's untapped potential rather than just their current performance level.

"Spending time and longer time in careers with people and then holding them to a high standard means that they accomplish very often things that just they didn't imagine they could. To me this is the m..."

Treat decision-making as a pure function that should be re-evaluated whenever new high-fidelity information updates the 'state' of the problem.

"You make you re-derive literally every decision that is valuable, every foundational assumption, every foundational ABC direction. And you want to see the observation you've made in the meantime since..."

A 100-year vision focuses on the enduring mission rather than specific software projects.

"I talk about look in the future and then think backwards a lot, right? It's like what would we want to have done 20 years ago on this? We have very long-term plans. At 100 years you can't talk about t..."

Product leadership is a 'positional game' of building trust and territory, which makes future tactical wins easier.

"The positional game is like, what is the territory on the map that you are taking? What role do you play? How much trust do you have of merchants? Do merchants want more from you or less? Are you the..."

Avoid turning metrics into rigid goals to prevent 'overfitting' and the loss of unquantifiable values like quality and taste.

"Goodhart's law just says, 'Any metric that becomes a goal ceases to be a good metric.'... Why? Because no metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business because business are complex...."

Define problems by stripping away path-dependent compromises and rebuilding solutions from current atomic building blocks.

"You have to derive it from first principles. You have to say, 'How would we solve this problem given every fundamental building block that we have available right now?'... everything that you encounte..."

True product value comes from identifying and absorbing the complexity that prevents users from making progress.

"The amazing thing about software is we can actually just overtake this piece of complexity. We know what the taxes are everywhere and we are just doing it for you. You don't have to think about taxes...."

Strategic partnerships succeed by treating them as an iterated prisoner's dilemma where long-term coordination always beats short-term defection.

"Being a good partner in business is like this corporate marshmallow test that companies tend to fail in a very funny way... If you're talking about long timeframes, like 100 years, there is no questio..."