Warren Dunlop

*What Shopify Taught Me About Leading Transformation* I spent seven years at Shopify during one of the wildest growth periods in Canadian tech history. My office in Waterloo had just over 100 people when I joined and by the time I left, Shopify had over 10,000. New tools, new processes, new ways of working arrived faster than most people could absorb them. New ownership needs arrived before the leaders knew how to work with those needs. One of my greatest learnings was that the organizations that handle rapid change well don't move slower... they invest differently. Most companies treat transformation like a technical problem: roll out the tool, write the documentation, run the training sessions, measure adoption by counting logins. Check the box, move on to the next box. Figure out a way to check it, too. But people don't resist change because they don't understand the tool. They resist because change threatens their sense of competence, their identity, sometimes their value to the organization, or just their way to predictably make it through a list of checkboxes for the day. At Shopify we built programs for hundreds of managers who were leading teams through constant transformation. Not training on specific tools, but developing capability around leading others through ambiguity, redesigning workflows, making judgment calls about what to adopt and what to ignore. The managers who succeeded weren't the most technically skilled, they were the ones who could create clarity for their teams when everything around them was shifting. I'm seeing this pattern play out again with AI adoption in tech and energy companies, almost identically to what I observed at Shopify: Organizations invest in technology and at best pay lip-service to the people side, and then wonder why so little changes. ➡️ The tech is different. The lessons haven't changed. ⬅️ If you're leading transformation right now, where are you investing? In tools, or in the people who need to use them? #AILeadership #CanadianTech #FutureOfWork

42

4 Comments

🚨 New Event Announcement 🚨 Last year, a memo from Shopify CEO, Tobi Lütke, sparked one of the biggest conversations in tech: “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation.” Nearly a year later, what does that actually look like inside a product team? On March 30, we’re bringing you a rare behind-the-scenes perspective. 🎤 Keith Dell, Senior Staff Product Manager at Shopify, will share a candid look at how AI has reshaped the day-to-day reality of product work - from prioritization to velocity to team dynamics. Life After the Letter - A PM’s Reality at Shopify • What’s actually changed inside product teams • Where AI is helping (and where it isn’t) • What this shift means for the future of product management 📅March 30 ⏰Doors open 5:30 PM 📍BrainStation at The Well 🎟️Register here: https://lnkd.in/eKTDYNMW #TPMA #ProductManagement #AI #TorontoTech #ProductLeadership

18

2 Comments

Last week, Pluvo Co-Founder and CFO/COO Vanessa Galarneau took the stage at #accelerateOTT for a panel on what it means to build in the AI era. The conversation covered how AI is reshaping the way founders build, how teams operate, and how companies move from idea to execution faster than ever before. A few themes stood out: AI is not just changing what companies build. It is changing how they build. Teams are becoming smaller, sharper, and more AI-enabled. Traditional roles are starting to collapse as operators learn to build, automate, analyze, and execute across functions. And in this new era, speed matters. Huge thank you to the Invest Ottawa team for hosting such a great conversation, and to Sonya Shorey and Mark Sutcliffe for the energy and leadership they continue to bring to the Ottawa tech ecosystem. Proud to have Vanessa representing Pluvo in the conversation about where company building goes next! (photo via BetaKit 📸)

39

Every Ottawa builder we know has considered moving to Toronto or SF. The reasoning is usually the same: "there's no one here to build with." We don't think that's true. The talent is here. Carleton, uOttawa, Shopify alumni, gov-tech operators, solo founders grinding out of their kitchens. It was just scattered. No shared room, no shared momentum. So we built it. BCO (Builders Collective Ottawa) runs on two things: 1. Ship ruthlessly. Members post what they're building every week. Demos, launches, half-broken prototypes, rejected ideas. The norm isn't "when it's ready": it's "here's what I shipped yesterday, roast it." 2. Real Networking. Not coffee chats that go nowhere. Actual intros between people working on adjacent problems. Collaborators, early users, co-founders, the person who solved your exact bug last week. These compound, shipping publicly pulls people toward you, and meeting the right people makes you ship faster. We're already 200 builders deep. IRL meetups coming soon. The link is in the comments.

10

2 Comments

🔥 It is a very Shopify thing to do to give away our whole playbook. This technical deep dive into our latest Edition, from Andy Thelander, is a gift to the industry. If this is your jam, find two more juicy threads on X from Arnaud Tanielian and Jhey Tompkins, linked in the comments.

81

5 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about the "tech stack" debate and whether the platform used to build a site actually changes how a brand is perceived. To test it, I built this exact landing page on three different platforms: Squarespace, Framer, and Lovable. When I showed them to my network, nobody could tell the difference. It was a good reminder that for the founders and business owners I work with, the "how" doesn't matter nearly as much as the "what." They aren't looking for a specific software; they’re looking for a premium experience that tells their story and converts their audience. The value isn't in the platform, it's in the execution, the layout, and the attention to detail. By staying platform-agnostic, I can focus on picking the tool that actually fits the project’s goals, whether that’s high-end interactivity or a streamlined launch. At the end of the day, the goal is a high-quality result that solves the problem, regardless of what’s happening under the hood. #WebDesign #UserExperience #Framer

3

Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin, who has helped lead the Canadian retail tech giant’s AI charge, is departing after two years. $SHOP #CDNtech

19

We spend HOURS in virtual conference rooms wordsmithing the "perfect" way to describe what we do. Meanwhile, our customers have already described it better than we ever will... we're just not listening. Some of the strongest copy I've written wasn't written by me. It was lifted, nearly verbatim, from how a real customer talked about the product in a call. The phrase they used unprompted, the problem they named in their own words, the offhand line that made everyone in the room go "that's it." Your testimonials, your sales call notes, your support tickets, your DMs... they're full of the exact language your next customer is already using in their own head. When your copy echoes the words they'd use, it reads as "they get me." When it's your invented marketing language, it reads as an ad. This week: pull three real things customers have said about you and see how much better they are than your homepage.

41

1 Comment

“Two Ottawa data nerds start logistics firm for remote workers.” We’re building Canada’s simplest device retrieval solution for remote teams - pay-per-use, no subscriptions, no complexity. Thank you OBJ for the spotlight. If you manage IT, Operations or HR for a remote company, this one’s for you 👇

4