“In your first 6 months here, here is your number one job. Familiarize yourself with the dozen senior people at Shopify who have the final call on really important decisions, from Tobi and Harley on down. You need to familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy around business and around how Shopify works. Go consume every written memo and every podcast episode (we have a great internal podcast called Context) they’ve ever done, get inside their heads, learn their perspectives and their preferences, and learn what gets them to say Yes to things.

“Here’s why this is your most important job. In your first six months, you’re gonna be useless anyways. You’re going to be drowning in new information and context and it’ll take you a few months to learn how to swim. But then once you do, you need to become effective. And in order to be effective, you need to know how to get those people to say Yes to things, and how they would think through a decision down to a detailed level. If you can do that, then you can get basically anything you want done. If you can’t do that, then you’re never going to get anything done. Therefore, this is your most important job right now.”

I remember thinking at the time, wow, that sounds like really important advice, I should listen. And I did put in some effort; not nearly enough, in retrospect, but more than zero. Now, six months in, I’m not nearly at a point where I would consider myself “effective” yet – I still have a long way to go in that department. But that advice is paying huge dividends already; not only with my own initiatives but actually more so with helping other groups with theirs.