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James Johnson from Shopify | #542

• Nathan Bush • Episode 542

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James Johnson is the Enterprise Leader at Shopify and a curious problem-solver at heart. With a background in building and scaling tech solutions, JJ’s now focused on helping some of the biggest retailers unlock growth through Shopify’s enterprise capabilities.

In this episode, we cover:

  • How long bike rides help him untangle complex problems (aka “mental marination”)
  • Why Cursor is a game-changer for coding, even if you’re not a developer
  • The parenting lessons that come from raising three boys in a caravan
  • What Crumpler taught him about brand experience and staying local
  • How he stays sharp while leading with curiosity inside a fast-moving tech giant

This episode was brought to you by Convert Digital

Check JJ main ATC episode here

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Speaker 1:

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Checkout. We catch up with previous Add to Cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, bushy. Today's checkout features James Johnson, otherwise known as JJ. He's the Director of Retail at Shopify Australia. In New Zealand, jj shares the one online shopping goal that he set way back in 2001, the Melbourne brand that he can't stop buying bags from and the AI tool that's seriously leveling up his coding game, even though he describes himself as a crappy coder. Jj, welcome to the Checkout. A very special in-person checkout here in the Bush residence recording at Descartes. But we are here to learn more about you. We've heard all about Shopify additions that just dropped.

Speaker 1:

Very exciting, very exciting, and you blew our brains on that main episode around the future of commerce and where you see it heading, especially as we enter into that new AI era. But we want to learn about you. Five quick questions Are you ready? Let's do it All right? Number one what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?

Speaker 2:

So maybe not one unique weird thing, but, as we shared in the main episode, I had the great fortune of completing a Bachelor of Electronic Commerce and graduating in 2001. And so I had a very specific goal at the end of 2001 to purchase all of my friends and family's Christmas presents online. So I achieved that goal. Maybe the presents weren't the most amazing presents that anyone could have had, because the internet 24 years ago gift cards and a few other things.

Speaker 2:

maybe it wasn't amazing, but I achieved my goal and definitely have been an early adopter from that online shopping mindset from then and continued that journey forever.

Speaker 1:

It's amazing that you finished that degree in 2001 at 12 years old. Thanks, mate, looking fresh, all right. Number two which retailer has most inspired?

Speaker 2:

you recently. So, just like my kids, I don't have favorites, but I do have favorite retailers and do have favorite kids. But don't tell them that. Yeah, I've got a number or a real affinity for local Aussie brands and I shared in the main episode talking about Crumpler, so maybe let me geek out on that again. So amazing brand. They started off making bicycle courier bags. The way they actually talk about their products is you can literally fit a slab of beer in this bag and like sign me up cycling, I've got a slab of beer. I can put it on my back, ticking all the boxes. It's a great Aussie brand. They talk about their products. They're super passionate. They're handmade in Melbourne. So I love the business, love the brand, love also that they're using, unsurprisingly, shopify online and in-store and so their experience is amazingly quirky online, so I encourage people to check that out. And also amazing in-store, and a great combination of the both as well. So Crumpler would be my pick.

Speaker 1:

I love that and we don't hear a lot about Crumpler. But I've got a feeling that if you're a Crumpler fan, you're a big Crumpler fan Like they don't try and be for everyone right.

Speaker 2:

Definitely not, and I think I am that fan. I have at least 12, maybe even more bags in the collection. Imelda Marcos, eat your heart out.

Speaker 1:

I love it, All right. Oh God, this is a bit of a gimme, isn't it? Name a piece of tech that you or your business couldn't live without. Am I allowed to say Shopify? No, you're not.

Speaker 2:

Oh okay. So if not Shopify, I'd say Cursor. So for those that don't know, cursor is an AI coding platform. I share that example because it's helped me level my game up. I'm a crappy coder, I know my way around broadly what I'm doing, but it has helped really amplify my output and honestly helped me learn what I need to learn. So we have an internal value at Shopify about staying curious, and the way that I'm staying curious at the moment is using Cursor to help build functions in Shopify, to help build stuff outside of e-commerce, and it has this richness of context because it understands a code base, understands the context of what you're building in and means that I can level up. So I'll say cursor.

Speaker 1:

What's the project or the piece that you're most like? Hell, yeah, I did that.

Speaker 2:

There's probably two things. So one I built a really relatively complex promotional rule for in Shopify functions, which is Shopify's extensibility for a retailer to be able to do a demo so to prove we could do a point. They had this really complex and bizarre, frankly, promotional setup and so I was able to use Cursor to go here's what it would look like and here's how you'd do it. So professionally it's tick box and nice. And then personally built a calculator with my kids. So we actually built a kid's calculator that was super bright and colorful and that was an exercise of again me learning the tool but also helping them to learn some of the concepts and tools as well.

Speaker 1:

So it was nice from a personal level and then you showed your kids and they're like Dad calculators are.

Speaker 2:

So last year we're just talking to GPT- Can I turn it upside down and spell something inappropriate? I don't know what you're talking about. What do I spell? Neither do I. Okay, all right, interesting.

Speaker 1:

Number four can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should get into?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I read Nexus by Yuval Harari last year. The subtitle for those who don't know is A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Just rolls off the tongue. It's amazing. So if you don't know him, he's the author of Sapien's foundational book in that space, see it on the bookshelves up there I do.

Speaker 2:

The book covers the power of information and the importance of understanding our role in information networks, and the bit that really resonated with me was the historical examples and contexts and how that compares today. So he looked at what the churches were doing thousands of years ago, what the Roman Empire was doing, how the Soviet Union used information in what churches were doing thousands of years ago, what the Roman Empire was doing, how the Soviet Union used information in what they were doing, and so I think we naturally think that whatever's happening today is really unique and it's never happened before. The reality is that there are historical precedents here. Yes, it wasn't using AI, but there's lessons we can learn in terms of how we respond to information and how we can amplify its impact. So I really love that as a reason.

Speaker 1:

Has it changed your perspective? Because I can imagine that there's a lot of pressure on you as a senior leader in an organization like Shopify to keep up with the change and, to you know, to a certain point, spread the change. I don't know, it doesn't sound right, but it's like you are the one who's like talking about all this new stuff that's coming down the line. Has that helped give you perspective on how to position that to people so it's not so overwhelming that it feels like too much?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think maybe not that book specifically, but broadly yes, and it's about understanding the human amplification opportunities to come. So usually it's a discussion around here's a thing that's going to make you more efficient or mean you can remove the drudgery to do the thing that's more impactful or more exciting. That's usually the discussion, but it is helpful nexus of the book to talk about what that information framework is and how you should think about some of those constructs.

Speaker 1:

Very good, last one I've got for you. Jj, what is your biggest challenge?

Speaker 2:

today.

Speaker 2:

We just kind of spoke about a little bit of it, and I'm an opportunity guy rather than a challenge guy, so it's a bit of a cliche, but personally it's keeping up with all of the things that are going on in industry.

Speaker 2:

So industry is changing dramatically, ai is changing dramatically and accelerating those pieces. Frankly, shopify continues to change at a rapid rate, and so it's how do I encourage teams and how do I do that myself to keep up with that change? And so we have values around that, internally, culturally, within Shopify, which are great, but there is a volume of change that is implicit there, and so I guess my tip or my takeaway from that would be find people in your network that you can have a real chat with about how they're doing those things and maybe a plug for your community. You know, use the community that is available there, because, particularly in retail and we we found this at our dinner a few weeks ago great discussions happened because 90 of the problems that everyone has are the same across the industry. There are people that have either stubbed their toe and figured it out or are going through the same thing. That's right, and so how do you share those problems to really amplify the impact is the real opportunity.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I feel we're really good at that in our industry, especially in Australia, and I reckon Canada is probably going to be pretty similar about being open with sharing, because and we have this conversation all the time it's not so much what you know or what you're ahead of, it actually comes down to implementation as well. Right, absolutely, execution's everything. Right, exactly. I've got a sixth question for you. This is a first. Okay, we're going to check out. Right, we've never done a sixth, but you're so good, jj, I'm sitting down. All right, you ready Number six. If you were to pack up your family three kids, wife, go in a caravan, travel around Australia for six months what would be your biggest tip to people who might be considering that adventure?

Speaker 2:

Great tip. So, again, we've literally just done that thing. It wasn't a random question, very specific. We were super fortunate to be able to make that happen. We made sacrifices to make that happen, but also you want to acknowledge that we're very fortunate to do that.

Speaker 2:

I guess the tip would be that not everything was a perfect Instagram moment, which is probably not surprising, but we are definitely closer as a family unit and bonded in many ways. Part of that is having three boys in a small caravan and the smell that's associated with that. Your poor wife she's very lucky to have us all. I'm sure she thinks that every day, but I think it's being very intentional. And again, everyone's version of that will be different. For us, it was experiencing that travel and the Australian landscape. For others, they won't have the opportunity to take such a big chunk of time out or to be able to travel. But whatever your version of that is, lean into that would be my tip and be very intentional with it because, to be very deep, you know life is short and we need to. You need to have a bigger view of your impact in the world and how you can. How you can have that ongoing impact. I think would be the key point.

Speaker 1:

I love it. Jj, thank you so much for joining us on a special six question version of the Checkout. Thank you, nathan, on a special six-question version of the checkout. Thank you, nathan. You want more? Jj, head back to the main episode. That's episode 524. Link in the show notes here, where we break down the latest Shopify additions release called Horizons. We explore what AI really means for e-commerce teams and we ask the big question will websites still matter in 2030?