Ciaran McAuliffe

In case you missed it, here's a summary of some of the takeaways from the Toronto Product Management Association event I participated in last week

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Another year, another one-day, high-intensity Product Marketing Certification and training with Product Marketing Alliance on December 3, 2024, in Toronto! 💪 The best part? No fluff—just actionable, real-world insights you can apply immediately, while learning alongside a private cohort of peers in the heart of Toronto. It's now only a few months away, so be sure to sign up in the thread below. 👇 #productmarketing

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It's not every day that you can say you're reshaping an entire industry. We're seeing more and more businesses asking about B2B on Shopify. Direct-to-consumer brands that recognize the value in growing their sales channels, and merchants who've been dominantly wholesale for years, want a less complicated B2B experience that's brand-forward and beautifully self-serve. They want to equip their sales reps to be less about manual order entry and more focused on revenue growth. The world is recognizing how Shopify is creating a more modern B2B commerce stack that combines the convenience and usability of DTC with the bespoke and tailored experiences of B2B. See for yourself.

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While I have yet to read in detail why Shopify's stock is down 20% post earnings, a not widely talked about recent event did catch my eye. That is Shopify’s recent acquihire of Peel Insights. Analytics is a tough category, and has long been afterthought within Shopify as there’s not a clear monetization strategy. Yet Shopify’s Triple Whale investment and deal with Peel point to a large theme that may be at play. Demand generation has long been Shopify Achilles heal, instead relying on the likes of Meta, Google, and TikTok to drive traffic. But in the wake of privacy related issues the efficacy of media platforms in driving DTC sales is in question. This leads to a spiraling effect, as with questions comes: ** Lack of confidence of where to spend ** Lack of confidence means tighter budgets ** Tighter budgets means less revenue growth ** Less revenue growth means lower payment processing revenue for Shopify (e.g. ARR) And where does Peel’s team come into play? Tools like TripleWhale that are pixel-based are having a hard time with tracking in the wake of privacy issues. I see this as a hedged bet to work with a team that is more familiar with compliant first-party data from Shopify as well as showing impacts from external marketing sources. This is another reason why Shopify has worked so hard to in-house data feeds from the likes of Amazon Buy With Prime and TikTok Shops. While analytics may be a loss leader, smart measurement is a critical piece of confidence building both for brands and investors who fund budgets.

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I’m fortunate to be working in our Toronto office this week as leaders across the company have gathered for quarterly planning. One of the big questions we're answering is: What's composable commerce? This may seem surprising—because for the past ~5 years we've been exclusively focused on serving brands who are investing in composable platforms. But something has been happening over the past ~12 months. MACH and composable have gone mainstream, and that is changing the dynamic for what it means to go composable. - How many best-in-class/MACH technologies does it take to make a composable platform? - Does having a commerce suite with martech on top mean you've gone composable? - Might we be 'composable shaming' brands taking a more measured and incremental approach to composability? I love collaborating with our team and wrestling through these and other tough questions as we help brands to embrace greater composability. The journey is as important as the destination, and I'm excited to see how we continue to innovate and lead in this space.

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Interesting watch for anyone in the Shopify & Klaviyo ecosystem. 🎥 At the recent Editions.dev conference in Toronto, Shopify CEO and founder Tobi Lütke & Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki (AB) had a fireside chat discussing learnings, strategies, and challenges scaling up both businesses. 🚀 It was a great experience being at the live event, and the session was recorded for those interested in watching these two eCommerce heavyweights in conversation. Watch the insightful discussion here: https://lnkd.in/duazpj6Z #Shopify #Klaviyo #eCommerce #BusinessInsights #EditionsDev

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3/7: How to increase conversions for hyper-local businesses? 🏙️ A lot of small merchants who have their own physical stores want to promote their products more to a hyper-local audience! Say you’re promoting a sneaker drop in Toronto, and someone from the area visits your website. Here’s how you can personalize their experience: 1️. Use a personalized banner to call out visitors from Toronto on your website. 2️. Show hand-picked Product suggestions relevant to their location. These simple strategies are so underappreciated, but they really work. Do you run a business that needs more hyper-local personalization? Checkout more such strategies in our #BFCM2024 e-book or DM us for direct demo! Link to e-book in comments 👇

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Last night, I attended BetaKit's Town Hall on the state of innovation in Canada. It was an inspiring event that brought together Toronto's brightest minds to discuss how we can move forward. Every speaker resonated with me, but a key takeaway is the immense opportunity we have to showcase Canadian craftsmanship in building world-class products. We can also empower the next generation to follow suit. Here are the top points that struck a chord with me personally: 1. Tech Talent: Scale up your career in Canada and make monumental impact here. (Ivan Zhang of Cohere) 2. Canadian Government: Continued innovation is crucial for solving problems in outdated industries like healthcare and pharmacy. Don't stifle our ability to make a real difference in the everyday lives of Canadians. (✨Joella A. of MedEssist | Transforming Pharmacy with Technology and AI 🏥) 3. Top Tech Leaders of Canada:  Our arguments about stagnation hold weight across Canada. Let's focus on the most impactful solutions. Is capital gains tax the most effective approach to get buy in from the average Canadian? (Ali Asaria, formerly Transformer Labs, Tulip) 4. Industry Veterans: Our mentorship is invaluable, especially for young professionals entering the remote workforce post-pandemic. Make time to guide them. (Jocelyne Murphy of Socratica) 5. Canada: Our differentiator is our CRAFTSMANSHIP. We have excellent product builders. Let's keep building here. Let's keep learning here. Let's get better here. (Tobias Lütke of Shopify) Let's go 🚀 #CanadianTech #Innovation #BetaKit #TownHall

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Sharing real stories from the trenches of product management. First topic - balancing big visions 🌟 with building MVPs that actually solve problems 💡 Would love to hear your thoughts! 👇 https://lnkd.in/einzrwbZ #ProductManagement #MVP #Startups

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Who better to talk about Shopify's trajectory and future than Benjamin Lang • OLY.? In our 50th podcast episode, I had an extremely interesting conversation with Benjamin about a lot of awesome topics that are close to my heart, and I can't be more excited about what's happening in the Shopify ecosystem. For example: • B2B features • From only online commerce to commerce in the more broad sense of the word • The focus on TCO • Customer centricity I'm very grateful I had the chance to talk to Benjamin, and I hope we can do it again some time in the near future as things are moving so fast. Thanks a lot for your time and effort Benjamin! #deardigital #shopify #podcast

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Checkout is just a form. How hard could it be, right? 🤷🏻‍♂️ That's not wrong, but it turns out that the answer is "very". Once you account for all the business requirements (how things are sold, bundled, paid for, ..., delivered, etc.), the byzantine landscape of regulatory and compliance requirements around the world, and the operational scale of serving spiky traffic, ..., it's a challenging service to deliver and operate at scale. Checkout is complex. Shopify makes it simple. Fun conversation with Benjamin Popper and Cassidy Williams: https://lnkd.in/e-3aDwJu

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Gathering and prioritizing customer feedback - at scale! - is an incredible challenge. A decade ago, we standardized on portals where customers can contribute, sort, search, comment, and vote on ideas. Product Managers spent hours, days, and weeks triaging responses, responding to ideas, and generally becoming frustrated with not being able to keep up with the amount of incoming feedback! Today, Pendo launches Listen as part of the Pendo One Platform. It is such a massive step forward in how we can capture customer feedback from seemingly endless sources, collate, summarize, intelligently route, validate, and take action on it. It's really magically and scales beautifully. I think it focuses in on the difference between hearing the voice of your customer and truly listening. Hearing is about a single sense. Listening involves all of your senses. Pendo Listen deeply integrates our quantitative analytics, integrations, and replay to Listen to your customer and take action. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eTPR4HiQ

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Flexibility with time and work-life balance = Freedom. This is why I love building apps for the Shopify ecosystem at Lightward. Work needs to be done, but it can be done at any time and never at the expense of health. See our company priorities at https://lnkd.in/gNDWuts9. Every employee's first priority is their own health. What a simple but amazing imperative. The bet here is that the cumulative effect is additive, not subtractive: that the health of all individuals blooms into the health of the whole. For me, as the father of 4-year-old twins, this freedom means never missing a swimming lesson, a soccer game, or a chance to have an impromptu dance party in the kitchen 🕺💃👯. It will also mean working at the cabin this summer, while my kids attend day camp nearby and then getting to build memories in the evenings and weekends. What does freedom look like for you in your workplace? Share your stories below! 💬 Thank you to Lightward Isaac Bowen Abe Lopez Shopify

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🚀 Simplifying Platform Management 🚀 Being a Platform Product Manager can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be! Inspired by a brilliant talk from Brandon Chu (former VP at Shopify), this week I’m sharing key takeaways that simplify the world of platform management. If you manage a platform or are looking to break into this role, these insights can help you confidently tackle the complexity. #PlatformManagement #ProductManagement #Leadership #BrandonChu #TechEcosystem #GrowthMindset https://lnkd.in/gj4snG84

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Small Shopify history: The story of Shopify began in 2004 when three friends from Canada—Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake—decided to open an online snowboard shop. Tobias, a programmer by training, took on the task of developing the website but soon encountered that the e-commerce platforms available at the time did not meet their needs. They were either too limited in functionality or too complicated to set up and manage. Dissatisfied with the available solutions, Tobias decided to create his own platform that would be both powerful and easy to use. This decision led to the development of proprietary software that would allow easy launching and managing of online stores. The project took two months to complete, and ultimately, the new system not only satisfied their own needs but also showed potential for other entrepreneurs. In 2006, after successfully launching their online store, they founded Shopify—a platform that made creating and managing online stores accessible to anyone who wanted to sell products online. Initially, Shopify primarily attracted small businesses, but over time it became popular among large companies due to its scalability and flexibility. Over the years, Shopify has grown from a startup to a leading global e-commerce platform, serving hundreds of thousands of clients worldwide and having a significant impact on the global economy. If you want your own Shopify store, just DM me 😉 #shopify #history #ecommerce #splitdev

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During my time at Shopify, one of the most underappreciated products that our customer success managers loved recommending to merchants was Shopify Collabs. Launched in August 2022, Collabs is a rebranded version of the Dovetale app, designed to bridge the gap between merchants and content creators in today’s booming influencer and creator economy. This product allows brands to discover influencers who align with their needs and budgets while empowering creators to monetize their content effectively, and position Shopify as a leader in the global marketplace for online products and influencer marketing But why is this important? Influencer Impact: 49% of all participants, and a staggering 87% of Gen Z participants, report choosing products recommended by influencers. This makes influencer partnerships a crucial strategy for brand visibility and engagement. Cross-Platform Reach: Platforms like TikTok, projected to reach 955 million users by 2025, offer enormous potential for brands to extend their reach and tap into diverse audiences. Measurable ROI: With tools like shoppable videos and social commerce integrations (think TikTok Shopping, YouTube, and Firework), brands can now directly measure the impact of influencer campaigns on key metrics like conversion rates and average order values (AOVs). Take, for example, Kevin Lee and his team at immi, a brand redefining the ramen industry. They use Shopify Collabs to build authentic relationships with ramen enthusiasts by sending out hundreds of samples to creators. This not only garners valuable product feedback but also helps identify creators who are genuinely excited to champion the brand. Over time, this strategy has enabled Immi to grow a community of over 400 members and more than 145 affiliates, driving substantial referral sales for the brand. While Shopify Collabs is a powerful tool, it’s also worth exploring other influencer marketplace platforms like GRIN, Upfluence, Creator.co, and Tagger by Sprout Social to see what best fits your brand’s needs.

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One of the best thing that happened at Loblaw Digital is at when I joined we were in process of migrating our analytics from Adobe to Snowplow. What this meant was, Snowplow will be housing data into BigQuery, and everyone in the org will be able to build views with Looker. This was a kinda big deal for me because it would unlock and unblock SEO team on a lot of data analysis part. Of course we would help of data teams - pros like Liam Baird and Mykyta Todorov (which they thankfully did(and still do), and SEO team is in forever gratitude of) but still there were things we could do on our own without having extremely heavy reliance. There was a bit of learning curve at start because BQ and Looker was new to me, but since I spent good time in LookerStudio(formerly DataStudio), it was easy for me to capture a lot of it. The result of this entire exercise has been extremely positive on SEO Team. Duane R. has been a great partner in this journey of learning new platform, and developing skills, views and reports. I'm happy to say, we are on our way where SEO Team will be able to pull in and join data from GSC(through BQ), Google Ads, Web Analytics(from snowplow). This will help us answer a lot of business related questions. It will also help us build monitoring views, reporting views and more. Better yet, now we could think of using these data as a feedback loop into our Helios Platform. We are already thinking/planning to automate building dynamic pages using this data in a way it makes sense for business. pSEO? wink wink. All this to say, I completed 2 years here last week. And these two years have been extremely rewarding in terms of my personal growth. I want to take an opportunity to thank everyone(without tagging anyone specific) for giving me the opportunity, the runway and resources to build what we could build together with Duane R. at LD. I'm sure there is more to come here, and I'm excited to continue to build SEO practice that's rooted in data, and anchored in driving meaningful results to the business.

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Not all fast software is great, but all great software is fast. Think about it, every single piece of software you like to use happens to be very fast. Everything just happens. There is no delay. But the software world has a rot at its core. While computers are getting faster and faster, software keeps getting slower. The zero marginal cost of writing bad and slow code has lead to most of the software we use being terribly slow. At Shopify, we do not accept this. Every millisecond matters.  That's why Shopify stores are the FASTEST in the world – and that's no accident. We know that customers buy more from sites that move faster, so we constantly invest in our infrastructure to give brands a leg up. Our server speed is up to 3.9x faster than everyone else's, allowing Shopify stores to render up to 2.4x faster. https://lnkd.in/eRJkq7mM

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