Morgan Brown is the VP of Growth at Shopify and the author of the book “Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success”. Prior to Shopify, Morgan led the product team at Facebook and was the Chief Operating Officer for Inman News – the leading news source for real estate and technology.
Given the size of the Shopify brand, they optimize metrics and data analytic processes from a “merchant-first” perspective. This helps guide them toward their mission of making online commerce easier and better for everyone. There’s no value in a spiking lead conversion rate if they don’t become customers.
Shopify relies on its growth marketing team (which Morgan is the VP of) for user acquisition. They also have a growth product side that focuses on activation signup, activation trials, and success retention. Internally, growth goals are divided into “missions” and mission teams include channel experts, product leaders, data scientists, engineers, and other cross-functional roles. This decentralized split of marketing teams helps these growth pillars move forward without friction as self-contained units.
Commerce is no longer a discrete point where you drive customers from point A to point B, but it’s really about being where that action is going to take place. Shopify recently partnered with TikTok to take their merchants where their customers are and bring the tools of giants like Instagram closer to their merchants.