Strategy
Decisions: One-way and two-way doors
In his 2015 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos talks about two types of decisions - those that are best represented as one-way doors, and those that are more like two-way doors. Thi...
Blurring the Line Between Software and Services
The idea of bundling software and services together has been around for about as long as there has been software. In the earliest days of software development, everything was on...
Shopify Ecosystem Consolidation
I've been actively involved in E-commerce for a few years now, and one of the most impactful trends I'm seeing is consolidation among the apps and services used by merchants. It...
DRY, WET, AHA, and Doing Things That Don't Scale
If you have been building software for a while, you've undoubtedly heard "Don't Repeat Yourself", commonly shortened to DRY. The phrase suggests that you should write your code ...
So you develop software. Are you a software company?
Many companies do some form of software development. It might be software that is offered to others in the form of SaaS, it could be a team developing internal tools, or it coul...
"Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on details" - attitudes towards innovation and failure at Amazon
During a shareholder meeting in 2011, Jeff Bezos was asked a question: "If it's still Amazon's philosophy to make bold bets, I would expect that maybe some of them wouldn't work...