Brandon Chu

Writing externally and gaining external momentum was a better way to influence what was happening internally at Shopify than trying to get attention inside the company directly.

Your job as a PM is to help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way.

Platform PM validation cycles are 5–10x longer than consumer product cycles. You design a canvas for developers to build on — not the end user experience. Your psychology has to shift completely.

The hard PM skills — analytical, organizational, technical — are table stakes. What actually drives a high trajectory is founder skills: storytelling, high-conviction decisions, leading through ambiguity.

The most important thing about any decision isn't the decision itself — it's figuring out how important that decision is. Spend all your time on the few critical ones. Delegate or gut-call everything else.

When people join your team and have already read your writing, onboarding becomes easy — they already know how you think. Public writing scales your influence far beyond what you can do in any meeting.