Jean-Michel Lemieux on Why Most Companies Overplan 100x

You Don't Build Products, You Build Movements

When Jean-Michel Lemieux joined both Atlassian and Shopify, he learned the same lesson twice: the best companies don't optimize for product. They optimize for getting eyeballs and building communities first.

Atlassian built a movement around open source and easy software 20 years ago. They ran campaigns like "cash for clunkers" and went after Joel Spolsky. Shopify partnered with Tim Ferriss early, tapping into the 4-Hour Workweek movement around entrepreneurship.

You don't build a product, you build a movement. Atlassian built a movement around how people work. Shopify wasn't about the product. It was about a movement of entrepreneurship. And it's not like that was accidental. We had meetings about, you know, we have to create a movement around entrepreneurship.

— Jean-Michel Lemieux

The overlap between both companies? Founders playing the long game and brilliant marketing. The difference? Shopify shipped on quality. Atlassian shipped on speed. Both became multibillion-dollar businesses using opposite playbooks.

Time Horizon Friction Is Killing Your Velocity

Most companies spend more time in meetings about work they're not doing yet than actually building. Lemieux calls this "time horizon friction," and it's the single biggest thing slowing teams down.

The problem is structural. You have people who can't write code but need to see progress, so they create plans. But the only way to create plans is to extract commitments from the people who can write code. So builders get stuck in planning meetings instead of shipping.

I believe that one of the things that slows teams down the most is what I call time horizon friction. You end up having more meetings about work that you're not doing yet than you are doing the actual work. I bet most companies overplan 100x. I'm not saying you don't plan. I'm saying you should just plan enough.

— Jean-Michel Lemieux

Lemieux's current startup runs on a radically simplified process: one meeting per week to discuss who's stuck. That's it. No standups, no Scrum, no story points. Just a quarterly conversation about direction and a monthly decision on what ships next. Everything else is shipping code.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Lemieux measures progress by looking at pull requests. Not lines of code, but the cadence and quality of what's shipping. Code talks, bullshit walks. If you see a consistent hum of valuable code getting merged, you're winning.

Every month, he splits the roadmap into two buckets: half gets polished to the point where customers tell their friends, half gets shipped fast without the polish. The key is time capping everything and deciding as a team what deserves the extra attention. Security and technical foundations? Polish them. Everything else is a weekly negotiation.

Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way Is Terrible Advice

The worst thing you can do as a leader is hire smart people and assume they'll magically align on quality, strategy, and execution. It never works. Lemieux learned this after watching "the biggest train wrecks in companies happen because bosses do that."

When he onboarded new VPs at Shopify, he didn't give them autonomy on day one. He gave them three things to ship in six months—things he already knew the org needed—and asked them to pair program on leadership.

We're going to spend a lot of time together. We're going to pair program on leadership. The reason we're going to pair program is it is as complex as programming. There's typos, there's bugs. The only way we can get to know each other is we're going to have to pair program on leadership.

— Jean-Michel Lemieux

One example: when he hired Farhan (who now runs engineering at Shopify), Lemieux asked him to publish a blog post on React Native and lead the mobile team's reorientation around it. They went back and forth on the blog post five or six times. Not micromanagement—mutual calibration. By year two, Farhan had full autonomy because they'd built a shared understanding of what great looked like.

Shipping Reduces Risk More Than Planning

Everyone's been conditioned by school to treat work like homework: get the assignment, go away, come back with an A+. No talking to others. No shortcuts. No iteration.

Then you enter the workforce and the entire game flips. Your job is to cheat as much as possible. Look at what others built. Ship prototypes. Get feedback. Cut corners strategically. Most people never make the mental shift.

Lemieux's thesis: shipping reduces risk, not planning. The more you ship, the more you learn. The more you plan, the more you assume. Assumptions compound into train wrecks. Code in production compounds into momentum.

At Shopify, he ran the same process he runs today: look at what shipped, evaluate if it's good or great, and ask why. Build an organization where everyone has an internal barometer for quality. Reward people based on output, not process.

The only way to build a shared understanding of what great looks like is to get messy together. Ship things. Debate them. Polish some, rush others. Do it again next week. That's how you build velocity at scale—and it works whether you're three people or 3,000.