How Shopify Executes Editions 🚚
A case study of how Shopify runs its famous bi-annual releases, plus how AI is changing its dev platform.
There’s always been a gap — and will always be — between how fast startups can operate vs big tech.
In many ways, this is an existential battle:
Startups need to be fast because that’s the only way they can topple incumbents.
Incumbents, in turn, need to prevent turning into slow, bureaucratic orgs incapable of building product, to avoid being disrupted by said startups.
Technology plays a big role in this: in times when tech moves fast, startups often have the higher ground, as they are faster at jumping on it. Conversely, when platforms change less, there is equally less opportunity.
Where does today fall on this spectrum?
If you asked me a couple of years ago I would have said meh — web and mobile haven’t changed significantly over the last decade.
But AI, of course, has changed everything. Companies large and small are scrambling to embrace the AI opportunity, both internally—upgrading their own tech and processes—and externally—offering AI-powered features across products.
So, whether or not we agree there is substance or it’s mostly hype for now, we can’t deny there is a race going on — which is interesting to me because it reveals, among other things, which companies are able to execute properly under more urgency, and which simply are not.
One company that I have followed closely over the years, because of its ability to steer fast and punch above its weight, is Shopify. You may remember our interviews with Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, and Kaz Nejatian, COO.
With 8000+ employees, out of which ~50% are engineers, Shopify may not operate at the scale of Meta or Google, but is still squarely in big tech territory. Yet, Shopify often likes to zag when others zig: it stayed remote-first when its peers issued RTOs, doesn’t quite like meetings, and has a peculiar product strategy that focuses on two big releases per year: one during summer, and one during winter.
From the outside, it also appears to operate at a higher throughput than its peers: it was one of the first to embed AI as first-class citizen into its product (with the launch of Sidekick last year), and recently revamped all of its dev platform to make everything AI-native (MCP support, infrastructure-as-code, etc).
So last week I sat down with Eytan Seidman, Director of Product for the Developer Platform, and we talked for an hour about largely two things:
🚀 How Shopify executes Editions — why they do product like that, and how Editions come together from an operational point of view.
🧑💻 How AI made Shopify rethink dev platforms — what is going to change vs what principles still stand.
It was an extremely interesting chat — so here is what I learned! 👇
Disclaimer: I am a fan of what Shopify is building and I am grateful to them for partnering on this piece. However, I will only write my unbiased opinion about the practices and tools covered here, Shopify included.
You can learn more about the latest Shopify Summer Edition below 👇
🗺️ The Strategy of Shopify Editions
At first glance, Shopify’s model of shipping two major “Editions” a year seems to defy the very principles of continuous delivery that modern tech companies live by. How can a company with thousands of engineers orchestrate such massive, synchronized releases without grinding to a halt?
The answer is, as Eytan tells me, that Editions are not what they seem.
They are not a monolithic release — they are a storytelling layer built on top of a robust, continuous delivery engine. They are designed to capture customer attention and create a coherent narrative, without sacrificing the speed and autonomy of individual teams.
Editions, however, are not cosmetic either: the features showcased are indeed made available after the big release. So how does this work in practice? 👇
1) Dual-track execution 🔀
Shopify operates on two parallel tracks:
📈 Continuous improvements — throughout the year, teams ship features, fixes, and improvements as soon as they are ready. This maintains momentum and ensures the platform is constantly evolving. You can see this happening in public through their regular developer changelogs.
💥 Biannual editions — twice a year, they bundle the most significant updates into a single, cohesive narrative. An Edition isn’t just a list of features; it’s a story with a theme, designed to tell the world where Shopify is heading.
This strategy tries to balance two elements that are seemingly at odds: engineers thrive on continuous delivery, but customers and markets respond to moments.
So, while small updates get easily lost in the noise, Editions create a gravitational pull, forcing the ecosystem to pay attention. They give Shopify a powerful lever to communicate its vision and a clear why behind all the new whats.
2) Balancing strategy & opportunities ⚖️
For an Edition to be successful you need a cohesive theme, which obviously can’t be cobbled together a few weeks before launch, but is neither fully formed from the start.
Eytan explains that leadership provides some direction early on, but remains flexible for opportunities. So, while some long-term strategic work is planned from the very beginning, it only makes up a fraction of teams’ time. A good chunk is left open to develop tactical ideas in response to where the market is going, to customer feedback, or to new emerging tech.
A perfect example of this was the Winter 2025 Edition — aka the Boring Edition.
While the focus on platform integration was clear from the start, a lot of the improvements (e.g. discounts with functions, functions on retail POS) were proposed bottom-up and came together during the period.
This reminds me of what we argued in The Four Types of Work: planned business items, on a 3-to-6 month time horizon, have their place but can’t take up all of your team’s resources. You need some slack to 1) seize unexpected opportunities, and 2) perform KTLO + maintenance stuff.
3) The Convergence Ritual 🔬
One of the most unique parts of Shopify’s process is an internal ritual they call “Convergence”.