Micromanagement is Real - Product Manager Shopify Employee Review

1.0
Oct 31, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefits, remote culture, generally nice people. I genuinely think the company will be successful and is doing important work.

Cons

The company seems to have adopted a culture of extreme micromanagement, especially for product managers. There are generally two layers of director and VP approval for any new initiatives for the product and engineering teams, meaning that most of the time as a PM is spent getting approval rather than working with customers to understand their needs and get things done with devs. It feels like overhead and micromanagement are more important than enabling pms with clear metrics and strategy. Being a lead at Shopify is the equivalent of spending all of your time management up rather than worrying about team health and innovation. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend this to more senior product people who want to actually innovate and lead teams or have the ability to push the envelope. It's more likely you'll be in the role of order taker/project manager than treated as a pure product manager.

Explore other reviews about Shopify

5.0
Jun 10, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Remote first culture. If you want freedom of location and a company to truly mean and support it - this is the place.

Cons

Constant change. Nothing to hold on to in this role, compensation, KPI's, tools all change every quarter.

2.0
Jun 29, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Kind and talented co-workers - Generous AI token spend - Fairly transparent company (has been getting less transparent over the years) - Lots of opportunity for impact

Cons

- Product management discipline is quite lacking since the new CTO joined - Microsoft culture is adding more chaos and stress, and causing projects to actually go slower - Managers are afraid to tell the truth to Mikhail about the loopholes in engineering; they just want to look good, so they rush their teams to ship crap - Top engineering leaders are moving out of management roles or leaving the company - Tobi used to be far more involved in ensuring a high engineering bar, but seems to have handed over the reins to the new Microsoft regime

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