Situational Background

Tobi Lütke, Shopify’s founder-CEO, leads with product craftsmanship, empowerment, and elegant simplicity. He treats leaders as stewards of a platform, not controllers of people, and preserves optionality while shipping continuously. Lütke values trust, autonomy, and clear written reasoning. Distinctive for calm product focus and high trust, he shows how simplicity, ownership, and continual refinement empower any creative organisation.

Practical Leadership Principles

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1) Product craftsmanship.

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Quality is kindness to users.

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Behaviours to model:

• Sweat the details that reduce friction.
• Kill one confusing feature each quarter.
• Dogfood your own product weekly.

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2) Trust and autonomy.

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Give people room to do their best work.

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Behaviours to model:

• Set intent, not instructions.
• Make decisions in writing; keep them visible.
• Default to open docs over private chats.

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3) Continuous improvement.

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Small, frequent upgrades beat big reveals.

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Behaviours to model:

• Ship weekly increments.
• Keep a public “what we improved” log.
• Review learnings in brief, regular notes.

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Call to action

Pick one friction to remove, write your intent for the next upgrade, and ship a small improvement before week’s end.

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