Listen to the original at Lenny’s Podcast ↗lennysnewsletter.com
By Lenny Rachitsky · with Brandon Chu · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Brandon Chu is a VP of Product at Shopify, previously a co-founder of a music startup and a PM at FreshBooks, and a widely read writer on product management. The conversation covers how Shopify builds product, how it handled remote work and the COVID period, how writing shaped his career, and the trade-offs of platform versus user-facing product work.
01Key learnings
- Treat domain expertise as table stakes; to reach the highest levels, lean into founder skills like storytelling, motivating teams, and making high-conviction decisions under ambiguity, per Brandon.
- Think of the PM role as helping teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way, acting as a servant leader rather than a dictator, per Brandon.
- Set annual directional plans but expect them to change; avoid sunk-cost fallacy and be willing to throw away work when the world shifts, as Shopify did during COVID.
- Write regularly even if the posts are private; the writing process itself sharpens your mental models and forces clarity that stakeholders deserve, according to Brandon.
- Use external writing to build internal influence and trust; posts can attract hires, gain executive attention, and accelerate a career even without going viral.
- Spend most of your energy on the few truly important, irreversible or high-impact decisions and make the rest quickly, going with gut or delegating, to keep team velocity high.
- Platform PMs must adjust to much longer feedback cycles and multi-stakeholder tradeoffs, so define the platform's guiding principles early to resolve conflicts between developers, merchants, and end users.
- Build a small side project, even a simple clone, to demystify technology and gain empathy for selling, supporting, and shipping software, which Brandon recommends for career growth.
“Your job is to help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way.”Brandon Chu · Lenny’s Podcast · 00:11:50
“It was the writing process itself that actually allowed me to solidify those mental models and those frameworks in my mind.”Brandon Chu · Lenny’s Podcast · 00:27:21
“The most important thing to figure out when you're dealing with any decision is actually figuring out how important that decision is.”Brandon Chu · Lenny’s Podcast · 00:37:22
02Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.