Merchant Practicality Lens
Translate new technology into a concrete customer outcome
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 91%
The Merchant Practicality Lens begins by asking what a technology will concretely do for the customer. Instead of adopting AI, blockchain, or another trend as an end in itself, identify a recurring customer job and build the smallest useful application. Keep the initial experience simple, then let more sophisticated capabilities become available as the customer's business grows. Finkelstein gives AI-assisted product descriptions and token-gated customer rewards as examples of translating technology into merchant use. Shopify's broader product philosophy adds a second mechanism: progressive capability lets a small customer start quickly while reducing the need to migrate away after growth. The lens joins practical value at entry with enough long-term capacity to retain successful customers.
Origin
Extracted from The Diary of a CEO
Core principles
- 01Start with the customer's practical problem, not the novelty of the technology
- 02Make the first experience simple
- 03Reveal more capability as customer complexity grows
- 04Design so successful customers do not have to leave
How to run it
- 1
Start with the customer
Identify the user and the practical task, cost, or friction the technology could improve. Express the opportunity without technology jargon.
Pro tip Ask what changes in the customer's day if the feature works.
- 2
Build the smallest useful application
Choose a use case narrow enough to implement and evaluate. Make the first experience accessible to a customer who is not an expert in the underlying technology.
Watch out A technically impressive demo is not sufficient if it does not improve a customer job.
- 3
Reveal capability progressively
Add or expose more advanced tools as the customer's needs become more complex. Avoid overwhelming a new user with the full system on day one.
- 4
Test the growth path
Check whether the product can still serve the customer if adoption, volume, or complexity rises sharply. Use demanding customers to expose limits.
Pro tip A challenging customer can reveal the next infrastructure or product requirement.
In the wild
Finkelstein says Shopify considered the practical implication of generative AI for merchants and identified product-description writing as one application. He describes using product photography or metadata to help generate copy intended to convert better.
→ The emerging technology was framed around a specific merchant task rather than novelty alone.
Finkelstein describes a store that can be created simply in an hour or two, while more solutions become relevant as the business grows in complexity. The stated aim is that successful merchants should not need to leave the platform.
→ A low-friction entry experience is paired with a longer-term growth path.
Common mistakes
Leading with fashionable technology
Starting from hype can produce features with no clear practical effect on a customer's work.
Showing every feature immediately
Exposing mature complexity to a new customer can make the product harder to adopt.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product teams evaluating emerging technology or designing platforms for customers at different stages of growth.
Not ideal for
Pure research work whose immediate purpose is discovery rather than a defined customer outcome.
From the transcript
“what is it going to do for merchants what is the practical implications of AI”
“as the complexity of your business increases the solutions on Shopify sort of reveals itself over time”
From the episode
Shopify President: How To Become A Millionaire For The Price Of A Starbucks Coffee!