Simon Eskildsen
I was on teams at Shopify subject to this—it was tough, but more often than not, @tobi ended up being correct. Now, as a founder, I get why Tobi did this more than I ever understood at the time. It is not the easy path. I have the luxury of our company still being smaller (40-50 headcount), so it's easier for me to intervene early. I am continually learning to find the best place during a project to insert myself, but sometimes, it ends up being late and painful; that just plain sucks. But, long-term it is much worse to ship things that are sub-par. The job of a leader is to pull pain forward.
tobi lutke
Yep. Except: 1. This was about important internal tools. The team was stuck in some architecture nightmare of their own doing (writing it in rails but headless, with graphql api, and a SPA react app, constantly needing frontend engineers for changes). I call this kind of thing 'cosplaying an enterprise production app'. All that complexity was in the way and using straight rails was perfect in that case. 2. I make calls like this all the time. Usually someone on the team asks me to. They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc. Sometimes this is jokingly referred to as Founder-mode-as-a-service here. 3. For ten years I’ve also run an internal podcast called Context, where I revisit decisions like these and explain the reasoning so everyone can learn from them. This is helpful to give people all the variables that were considered and why this was the choice made given the information available at the time. I want to teach how to make such decisions effectively without needing me. Sunk cost fallacy is a problem. 4. Any notions that Shopify is succcessful despite of me doing this, instead of because of it, will have a hard time making their argument come together I think 😄 the part of 'two weeks later tobi learns about...' is nonsese and the pivot of that project up there happens one of the more successful examples of interventions. But getting the company to work effectively with great architecture and low technical debt baggage into the right direction is literally the job, so guilty as charged I suppose. But there are always cope stories floating around like this because they are more fun, than saying 'somehow we needed tobi to stop doing silly architecture astronautics'. I can totally see that.