Six-Month Plan to Help New Shopify Sellers Decide What to Sell and Cut Early Churn

You are a product manager at Shopify. Your team has one year to turn Shopify into the best platform for new sellers by helping them sell products. What would you do in the first six months to make progress on this problem? Context the interviewer gives you: - Shopify has found that a major obstacle keeping today's online entrepreneurs from adopting the platform is working out which products to sell and then actually getting hold of them. - "Not knowing what to sell" is one of the leading causes of early merchant churn. - New sellers can be at any business stage, but every one of them is serious about building a business. ```hint Two gaps, many starting points The context describes two separate gaps: deciding which products to sell and obtaining them. Sellers also start from different places. Work out which gap, for which sellers, a six-month effort can close in a way that shows up in early churn. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - How is early churn measured: a store closed within its first few months, a plan cancelled after the trial, or a store that never lists a product or makes a sale? - New sellers can be at any business stage. Should the plan serve all of them, or may I focus on the stages where "not knowing what to sell" drives the most churn? - Can the solution lean on existing partners in Shopify's app ecosystem, such as sourcing and dropshipping apps, or should the team build its own capabilities? - What should exist at the six-month mark: a shipped product with measured impact on churn, or validated bets for the second half of the year? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Segmentation of serious new sellers by business stage, with the "what to sell" problem split into its parts (choosing a product, checking demand, obtaining supply) and a reasoned choice of focus. - Solutions for the chosen segment and gap that can ship and produce evidence within six months, sequenced so the second half of the year builds on them. - Success metrics tied directly to early merchant churn, with leading indicators that move inside six months, and guardrails. - Risks particular to product sourcing, such as supplier quality, many sellers chasing the same products, and overlap with ecosystem partners, with mitigations. ### Follow-up Questions - Three months in, sellers who use your product-discovery flow launch their stores faster but churn at the same rate as everyone else. What do you investigate? - Third-party apps in Shopify's ecosystem already help merchants find suppliers. How do you decide what Shopify should build itself and what it should leave to partners? - If your tool recommends the same trending products to thousands of new sellers, they end up competing with each other. How would you design against that?