Archie Abrams
Archie Abrams is the VP of Product and Head of Growth at Shopify, where he leads a 600+ person growth org across product, design, engineering, data, ops, and growth marketing. Shopify powers over 10% of e-commerce in the United States, with $235 billion in GMV in 2023 (roughly the size of Finland’s economy). He previously led Consumer product and growth at Lyft and was at Udemy for 8 years as SVP of Product having joined the company when it was 10 people.
Discovery & Research Skills
Long-term holdouts are essential to distinguish between true incremental growth and short-term "pull-forward" effects or low-value gains.
"So we constantly will relook at an experiment a year later, see that the way the GMV curve for the distribution was different than we might've originally thought. And that'll actually change what we d..."
Growth & Retention Skills
In a power-law business model, maximizing top-of-funnel volume by lowering entry barriers is more effective for long-term revenue than optimizing for low churn.
"In a given cohort of merchants, a lot of people will start. Some of those people on their first attempt that's entrepreneurship might not succeed, but the folks who do go on to be successful will make..."
Operating Cadence & Communication Skills
Segregating product teams by time horizons allows for a healthy balance between long-term vision-based building and short-term metrics-driven optimization.
"I think with Shopify, we very purposely set up different parts of the org to think on very different time horizons and with very different ways of thinking about how to build product and the like. Ver..."
Planning & Prioritization Skills
Measuring success through absolute volume rather than conversion percentages prevents teams from artificially improving their metrics by restricting the funnel.
"When you have teams naturally break up the world into different funnel stages or different points in the journey, it gets very seductive to look at my part of the funnel and what's my conversion rate..."