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Ben Sehl is a product generalist. Previously a cofounder of Kotn a beautiful, thoughtful apparel brand For Lasting Ways of Life. Now he leads product for Hydrogen, Shopify's headless commerce framework. In this episode we talk about how he studied semiotics at university and how he brings a philosophy of shared meaning and intention to all his work.
Volition is a podcast exploring how people get things done.
In this series of interviews we talk to people about how they have built new capabilities for their organisations, their countries and themselves.
Ben Parry: Hi there. Welcome to Volition. Volition is a series of interviews with intellectuals, artists, and entrepreneurs aimed at learning about their ideas, their passions, and their motivations.
This is the first episode a conversation with Ben Sehl. Ben is an incredibly accomplished product generalist. He previously was a co-founder of Kotn and is now the product lead for Hydrogen at Shopify.
In the episode, we talk about his views on semiotics, how teams can create a sense of shared meaning and the importance of setting proper intentions.
I've previously recorded a couple of conversations that I'd hoped turn into podcasts, though they didn't come together at the time. This is gonna be the first one that I planned for and recorded in this way.
I've tried to keep the editing to a bare minimum, focusing on removing filler words and dead air, but especially for my questions at the beginning of the episode, this meant that quite a bit had to go. Trust though that everything of substance is still there. Hopefully, as I get better at putting these together and can speak more fluidly, I can eventually remove the editing altogether.
For now. I hope that you enjoy this conversation with Ben Sehl.
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Interview with Ben Sehl
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Ben Parry: I did want to say off the bat that I really admire a lot of the work that you've done, that I've been able to see from afar. I am a Kotn diehard. I discovered the brand four or five years ago. My entire wardrobe is a combination of Kotn, little bit of Lululemon, and that's basically it and so really impressed by that brand.
Ben Sehl: Well thank you.
Ben Parry: I'm really excited about this conversation. To start an interesting topic for me, which is you have this personal website where you have a little bit of a description of your background and what you've done.
And you start off by saying that you studied semiotics in university. And I had to think that semiotics, that was not a random decision to put that word in there. I was interested in like, how would you describe what semiotics is, because I think there's a lot of potential different definitions and then why did you decide to study that.
Ben Sehl: I'm probably have to look it up in a dictionary. But the semiotics is really all that, the study of symbols and signs and I think. You're right. It wasn't a random word. The official major was communication studies with a minor in math. And and then I ended up doing cross registering to a different to university of Waterloo and doing fine arts there to I think through my career and now being in product management.
It was kind of hard to find: what's the thing? You know, growing up, everybody had these like really professional things. You're a doctor, you're a lawyer, you're a plumber, you're electric. Here's the thing that you do, and I never felt like I matched into anything super well. Like now I call myself a product generalist, cause I still don't even really know what to call myself.
But one of the things that I I think I have been working to build the skill of and I'm intrigued by is just the idea of lateral thinking and being able to learn things from a bunch of different groups and then see some different loose connections or make analogies. I make a lot of analogies to video games, for example.
But that was really what I got and honed with my education as well was really looking at how do we actually connect ideas together. And, how do we create mental models around things so that we can not have to be experts in an area to have the confidence to dive into it. But we can feel comfortable exploring unknown paths by drawing on our past experiences in a bunch of different areas.
So yeah, no one's actually ever asked me that before. I think I've always pride myself on being a pretty curious person. And I think that's, that sort of goes hand in hand with that. And I really, a lot of my classmates all went on to marketing or, a lot of different things that communications typically goes into TV and broadcasting and a bunch of stuff.
I didn't really want to go into that. Didn't really know what I wanted to go into but there were some different key professors that I felt like, oh yeah - the way that you think is something exciting about that. And I want to keep pulling on that thread. And so it was a major that I, I went into school because people were going into school.
Like I didn't have that much intention, honestly. And I'm privileged enough to be able to say that I got to be able to do that without a huge amount of direction. Leaving school and since then, I think the value of that education and study has actually just grown over time.
And I more and more look back to, oh yeah this is similar to how Vannevar Bush did this thing on... whatever. So these very different topics. But that, was certainly one of the things I think was like: Hey, we all use words, we use them in very different way, and we all have meaning and intent and how can I help connect ideas from different people and how can I bring those ideas to different projects where they might not be so obviously pulled on.
Ben Parry: So I thought you were going to say something completely different , I think you worked for Bruce Mau, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, for a little bit, then have this Kotn piece. So I thought the way you were going to go with this, but something to do with the symbolism of brands and the symbolism of these companies.
But it's really interesting that it's about this kind of connection of ideas, because if I'm understanding correctly, it's like by understanding how I did transfer through words, you can guess at what's the underlying meaning that can connect across various ideas and in a lateral way by, by reformulating them, is that Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Sehl: I think to bring it to the Bruce Mau context and branding and my experience in branding at the end of the day, we have to work as a network to get anything done. And in order to do that, you have. Be able to communicate with people and not have broken telephone happen in order to do that, you have to create really simple to distill messages and ideas that are also exciting and enable people to rally around.
And that also then extends into being a founder and really anything. But I think as it, it relates to branding, it becomes very literal where you are literally creating a symbol or a logo, and you're imbuing that with a story and you're trying to pair it down with a purpose a mission statement a brand slogan.
And you have to make that, you know, somebody is seeing that thing. They're interpreting what that means for them. They're telling that to their friend or friend is telling it to another friend you're not even there to help provide the nuance. And, so I think, and then you have to there's this concept that Simon Sinek talks about a lot.
But it's in many different forms has been talked about by many different people, which is start with why. to create something really cohesive and holistic. You want to start with a core purpose but you can tie everything back to, and sometimes that's not that clear and you don't have to nail it right away.
I think even if you just have the directionality and the feeling that's enough like we had a thing that we never really knew how to articulate that well, and now it feels all clear, but back then, and for the first, really until just fairly recently didn't really know how to tell the story. In a way that we felt was clear. We ended up working with a team somewhat recently who helped us really distill Kotn down to this one word, which was lasting. And it really helped unify everything that we did. It was like, it's about lasting impact. It's about lasting design. It's about these lasting products last in quality lasting ways of life was the slogan that came out of that.
And so what does lasting ways of life mean and how do we run everything we do through that filter. And I think, then taking it back to the brand, the imagery and the ideas, Egypt is a really h i storied or historical culture and nation. And just, goes back to the earliest depictions.
They, have the hieroglyphics, we have these symbols, to bring it back full circle to semiotics. So I think that was a really powerful realization and has helped to even if it, even if the change externally was only a couple of percent, just internally, I felt like nailing that really helped with the clarity, but it was so hard, it's always easier do it for someone else.
Like when I was at, as a, as at an agency than to do it from yourself. But yeah,
Ben Parry: That's really cool. So, if you think about that kind of storytelling January, it took you years with Kotn to get to that point where you could distill it into a word and a phrase. Where are you, do you think on that storytelling journey with Hydrogen. , Just maybe get a sense of how you're thinking about that and the journey of what you're working on that compared to why you've been,
Ben Sehl: I think Hydrogen. So one thing is interesting is I think it's always easier to do this for things that have a very clear job to be done that you can really describe with fashion it's. So
it felt so hard now it That's easy when we were trying to get to it, it was, I think also Kotn was our baby.
We, and we just did it. We started cause it was fun. Like we didn't start because there was this obvious gap and the like, there was a bit of a gap in the market, but it was more of think you tell backwards, it wasn't as much of oh, look at there's X amount of TAM to go attack attacking.
So I think when something's really, your baby is really hard to do as I said and it's always easier as an outsider to go in and with hydrogen, one thing is there's an amazing team already that I got to join. And the second was that there was a. It was a real pain point. I'd experienced from building the website for cotton and doing this headless architecture and all that sort of thing.
And then I got to just collaborate with the product marketing leads and really help dial it in. And for us, I think that the things that were resounding and okay... why did we do this in the first place? Like you could already build headless websites in other ways. Why did we do this while we, because we felt like for building headlight, headless well websites for Shopify, there wasn't really a great way to do it.
There were great frameworks. There's a lot of great different tools, but for an end to end experience only Shopify can do that. And you see it with companies like Apple or the different things when you have that end-to-end knowledge of what the full stack is going to be, you can unlock a bunch of different interesting things.
And that for us meant how do we enable developers To really every developer should only be doing like should only be in flow state every day should be like a, every developers, a 10 X developer, every developer, is just having a lot of fun. They're not doing the stuff that they don't want to do.
There's that this term, Amazon uses it called undifferentiated heavy lifting that I really like. It's all the stuff that we want to get rid of. There is this term from founder of basecamp called conceptual compression. I don't know if he came up with the term, but I read it from him that I also really like, you don't have to know everything about how something works in order to allow somebody to go and accomplish that.
So I think those are two of the angles that we're trying to do is create this really great developer experience that in turn feels super integrated with the admin. So merchants have a really great. Experience using it and can do so from their admin without having to know code. And then the net result of that is, is enabling these incredible shopping experiences because the developers were able to really dive deep on the UX and fine tune everything and have really great performance and do things with personalization that creates more relevant.
Experiences that ultimately drives conversions and improves merchant businesses. I think that was really the starting point for us was about making the best tool for this job. And it's also, I think I'm getting off track now, but we have this great ecosystem at Shopify with all these amazing apps and services and partners.
And in the headless context, I think there wasn't a great playing field for them to all come together on. And so that's one of the things that I'm really excited about now that Dave on my team is leading the initiative on is how do we really create this incredible extensibility platform?
And. For everyone to really easily build on top of and how do we create it in a way where the easy way to build is also the right way to build and headless while it unlocks all these cool new things that you can do. It also is a bit dangerous and you can do things the wrong way you can create, non-performant sites, you can create security problems, you can have things crash, I think those are all the things that, they all stem from that first idea of all right. What's the end game that we're staying towards. And it really starts with developers and creating incredible developer experience.
less, less crystallized then lasting. It's a sort of working backwards from why are people doing this in the first place? And then what are the bottlenecks to get them to that? end state.
Ben Parry: Cool. I'm going to try and link this together, but talking about developer experience and what also, I guess, talking about base camp I know at one point you were using Shape Up as part of your product management framework when you were at Kotn. I read that book. I love it. I think Ryan Singer is one of the most interesting people with his referencing to Christopher Alexander.
Is that something that you have continued with in your career? Is it something that you've brought at all to hydrogen? Why, or of why not? And what do you think, what do you think that framework gets? Right and is there anything you think that framework is missing?
Ben Sehl: So I think one thing that was interesting, I think part of that original semiotics question is there's this other book called Everything is Deeply Intertwined gold. I generally see, from the point on language, The same words can mean vastly different things and different words can often mean the same thing.
And the same is true for frameworks. There's a million different frameworks, there's a million different theories of million different concepts that, when you boil them all down there, a lot of them are saying the same thing in different words, and they're all valid. At Shopify there's not a huge amount of imposed process on things.
We do have some like high-level principle. To organize around and and some checkpoints and then it's on the different teams. My team is exceptionally strong. There's really senior people. And they're, they don't really, they don't really need or want a ton of process to follow.
That's. One of the things I think Shape Up does really well is that it is pretty high level and it's I think I borrowed some concepts from there. We don't really take it explicitly. We do follow a six week cycle thing, but that's not really related to shape up. It's just a way to keep a big company organized and aligned.
But I referenced a lot of the concepts from there and I think one of the things with any process is you don't want to do it. You want to understand like what's the value coming out of it and then you get to that value by whichever means is helpful. But the nice thing about frameworks is they allow you to align upon and have a shared language for how to do something in a certain way.
And if you can have other ways to get aligned, you don't necessarily need the framework. But it's a helpful tool that you can draw on when it's needed. But the two, the tools never solved the problem you have to, you don't just run things through a spreadsheet and all of a sudden you get the right answers come from asking the right questions and from doing the right things and from collaborating.
So things that I love from Shape Up hill charts, I think are just a fantastic idea. Like being at the top of the hill and seeing the problem wholly I really carry that a lot. There's a bunch of different tools that sort of align with that.
And the word I use is, situational awareness on my video game analogy list. One of them is I used to like to play this game called Skyrim or any open world exploration game role-playing game and all open world games. You have a skill level that you increase and then you see more of the map Zelda, or something's the same and whatever people want to take.
And so there is a situational awareness is like seeing more of that map and then your craft is actually just increasing that skill level. And some people have seen more of the map than others and they can share that context and bring people along and say Hey, here's where the bosses or whatever.
And some people are really skilled with Shopify specifically, just because I've been in the ecosystem for a decade, I've seen a lot of the math. I don't know how skilled I am, but I can at least recognize when others are really skilled. And thankfully there's a lot around me. And I could say: "Hey here's this thing, I'm in this part of the map". I also went and chatted with a few folks that also have this, so I know it's not just me. And how can we go about this and solve it? And yeah not really answering your base camp question, but. Just on the lateral thinking point.
I like to read a bunch of different frameworks. I read that one, I read about Lean Startup, or I read all these sorts of boring business, technical books. And then you sorta just throw it all away and you, the things that stick with you are the things that are probably important anyway. But just being really clear on the future, you're excited for being really clear on.
The goals that you want to accomplish, being really clear on what the problems you're trying to solve are and why they're important and who they're for and how you can dig in and learn more, being clear on what the requirements of a great solution look like not necessarily what the solution is, but what must be true in order for that solution to be successful.
Those are all things that I really liked from that book. And then there's a bunch of different ways that you can go about that and a bunch of different frameworks that are all quite similar. And so I like to not really squabble too much on process and if a team has a good process, then I'd like to be like, all right, cool.
Let me tap into that and see, oh, I can pick it up quickly. Cause I've read a few other processes that are fairly similar to this.
Ben Parry: Yeah, I, that makes no sense. I love this through-line of - it's not getting at like the deeper language - it's somehow of like, how do we find shared meaning across our various languages? And a framework does seem to get in the way of that like an actual frame of like ideas in a book, it can be helpful, but a framework prevents finding that kind of shared, meaning
Ben Sehl: I think that's actually so true. There's this book called The Secret to our Success. I haven't actually read it, but I've read the summary about it and so I'm going to try and fake telling the key point about it, but it's really all around, the whole secret behind humanity success is the knowledge, we build through generations and the ability to transfer that knowledge from generation to generation. And it's because nobody's going to do it all on their own. It all is through collaboration and coming together to work towards a common objectives. And so again, to that semiotics, it's the shared language and how do we both form the same mental models and understand what type of picture we're trying to draw together as quickly as possible and then throw away everything else. And now just like dive in on.
Ben Parry: I love it. I had one question I really wanted to get. You say in one interview that you had that you hate the tem "swag". And so I'd love to know why you hate the term swag.
Ben Sehl: It just sounds kind of corny. That's like the main one. The other reason it's called "stuff we all get" and I it's just not good. And I it's also, I dunno, mainly it just sounds funny. That's the main one. And then it's like, also, it's just this thing that has a such bad connotation.
It's 70% of all promotional merchandise, AKA "swag" is thrown out within two weeks. So, a huge contributor to garbage in the world. And as a result also CO2 emissions it just nobody wants it. It's clear why everyone's doing it. It's to put a company logo on a person, so they wear it.
So you get some advertising and so rarely is it like, if 70% of the time people throw out within two weeks, like that's worse than fast fashion. Like it's just, so I just really hate the term. Cause I think it's it's just so unintentional, Stuff We All Get by definition It's not for a specific team.
It's not for a specific type of person. It's not like crafted with care. It's not, there's not a huge amount of where the second order effects of the production of this thing. So I just really hate that. And I just, it just feels, I don't know, like I just don't. Just doesn't feel cool either. So I, and I don't really have a good one, merch, is cool. That's what I tend to opt for instead, merch is, I think the best next word that's closest that people would understand what I mean. And I don't think I've ever come up with another word that, that would be so good.
At the end of the day, if swag is the symbol that gets people connected. And I don't know, I just think...
Here's a thing with Shopify themes. For example, it's there's a thing called a Shopify theme. This isn't nothing to do a swag, but again, it's a sort of lateral jump, there's a thing called the theme.
It's just a framework for how you build a website. It doesn't mean that your test to look a particular way, you can make a theme. Look, however you. But whenever I was a Shopify partner and building for stores, some sometimes people would come and they say, I don't want it to look like a theme. I'm like, what does that mean?
And they like would not want this one particular type of header. It's That has nothing to do with the theme. You can make a theme. However you want the theme, is this really flexible framework for, creating a no-code way to edit your site and you can do so much awesome stuff.
And they make all these crazy decisions based on the fact that does not want to use a theme. And then when they talk to the technical people, they'd be like, okay, I guess I shouldn't create a theme. I should create like this other and sometimes people headless just for the sake of not wanting it to look like a theme. So I think with swag, it's a similar thing where it's like you say swag and it just starts to him. It's the semiotics thing again. It starts to impose all these other ideas of what that means, and we were talking when I was talking about sensibility too, with Hydrogen one of our teammates used the word plugin and I'm like, if you use the word plugin, it's gonna be a whole and we might use the term, we might end up using it.
But if you use that word. You have to recognize that it's got good emotions for some people it's got really bad emotions for other people, and it's going to take the whole conversation into a world that you're like... that's not even the point of why I'm here today. All you're trying to say is should you, or should you not be able to extend this thing in a unified interface?
Okay we need a shorter word for that. Okay. So let's go with plugin now, plugins, like we don't want to use plugins because plugins are do this as it's the semiotics thing. So it's the shared language. And how do you get. How do you get on the same base? And you're all speaking speaking the same words and understanding what those mean in the same way.
And it's just an I think it, it's just an impossible, there's not a way to do it. I think actually one of the I'm going on such a tangent here, but the only time I've ever found it going well is it's actually it's actually like a rare thing that you want to hold on to in certain types of relationships, when you can say the pace of your conversation can be so fast, not because you're saying so many words, but because the words you are saying, like, my brothers are twins and the term twin tuition, like they can just say a couple of words and, they do a thing with their eyes or something and they're both: "oh yeah, exactly." I'm even like this with my mother-in-law. She says one word. I say another word. Exactly. We're totally aligned.
That's really what that's about it. I think that's one of the hardest things with teams or companies, especially in the remote world is the shared language and aligning on things. I know we're at time over this conversation, it's been. Like, I'm not sure how you're going to write a title for it.
Cause we unintentionally had a couple of key themes come up, but I'm not sure if this is where he intended to go.
Ben Parry: I'm not sure where I intended to go, but I'm really happy with the ground we covered. I'm really excited to re-listen to it. I thought it was great.
Thank you for doing this. On a completely unproven, no idea who I am, I just reach out to you on Twitter and so, I really appreciate it. And yeah this has been absolutely fantastic.
Ben Sehl: On that note, cause one of my favorite thing, I saw this into somebody's Twitter bio one time and it just changed the way I looked at everything. For some reason, I don't what it was, but I said, my friend Nick's Twitter, bio said, shooters shoot. And I was like: "yeah, you know what?"
And I always just thought just go for it every time. What do you got to lose? And so when you reached out, you're like, you're, I can tell, Hey, this guy's shooting his shot. I've done it a bunch of times. Sometimes it works out time, sometimes it doesn't, but it always, every time it's worked out it's ended up being something cool.
So I usually just say yes and cause see where it goes. And I can tell you how to love intention and sincerity in what you're trying to do. And think it's cool. I always wanted to start a podcast too, but I just never got around to it. And wishing you the best of luck and it's really awesome that you doing this.
Ben Parry: Thank you very much, man.
Ben Sehl: You're welcome.