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Galen King

Senior Solutions Engineer at Shopify. I help brands dream, design, build, launch, and grow. Recovering agency founder.

📍 Vermont

Webinar: How to Stay Nimble as a DTC Brand

Some of my thoughts on how to develop more nimble mindsets in your organization, pragmatism, purpose, and a healthy dose of the first-principles of ecommerce—with a few nimble design and development conceps thrown in at the end.

Beware of the hidden costs of complexity

The more unknown unknowns there are in a design brief or system requirements, the more time is required to understand the core problems in order to design a suitable solution. Keeping things lean enables you to stay nimble, iterate faster, and grow more sustainably.

The journey isn’t just lonely at the top

In our effort to build lean teams, we tend to underinvest in team-building. We overload our teams with too much complexity and too many areas of responsibility without the frameworks or systems to support them or enable them to have sounding boards and forums for healthy discussion.

A first-principles mindset

If you’re building a people-first organization, you will grow faster and require less operational oversight if you develop and encourage a first-principles mindset in your team.

Developing a strategic plan for a new year—the hardest part is getting started

Some say, “the hardest part of running is putting on your shoes.” It’s not actually hard but, if you don’t do it, you won’t go for a run at all.

Okendo Partner Spotlight Series: The Evolution of Shopify

Earlier this year, I chatted with Rachel Tyers, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Okendo, about my journey launching one of the first Shopify agencies in the world, developing research-backed strategies for our clients, and how the Shopify/partner agency relationships have evolved over the years.

Reflections on what it means to build a people-first organization

As I strive at Lucid to build a healthier, people-first organization, I have been reflecting on some core principles of building a great team.

Learning to code for iOS and building a weather app in SwiftUI

I’ve been wanting to learn Swift for years—but have found it hard to get my head around the core concepts. I’ve also been wanting to build a simpler weather app—focused on the current day and immediate future and nothing else. I have a beta! Making progress.

Are you leveraging email flows and automations on your store?

When I audit ecommerce brands, one of the first things I look at is their email and SMS automation flows. What I often find is that brands are barely using any flows or automations or, if they are, they’re not AB testing or tweaking and optimizing the flows for continual, iterative improvements.

Some of the risks funded ecommerce startups face around over-designing and over-engineering for launch

For brands that have seed-funding, there is a strong tendency to get caught up in the look-and-feel and functionality of the website. Funded brands tend to quickly lose sight of factors such as nimbleness, technical debt, and the ability to iterate quickly based on analytics and data.