RELAY COMMERCE
General Manager of a Shopify app division. The P&L, the team, the strategy, and the reporting layer underneath it.
3
Products
P&L
Full Ownership
4
Functions Reporting In
1
Seat
What The Job Covers
General Manager of the Messaging division at Relay Commerce since May 2026. Three Shopify apps, email and social proof, used by tens of thousands of merchants. I set the direction and I own the result, which means the strategy, the P&L, the team and the roadmap sit in the same seat.
E-commerce is a good place to learn this job properly. A merchant installs in a minute and uninstalls in a minute, revenue arrives through more than one billing rail, and the category commoditises faster than the roadmap moves. The part that is less standard is the reporting layer. Rather than writing a specification and waiting for it to reach the front of someone else's queue, I build the view myself, read-only and version controlled, and hand it over when the company wants it. That changes what an operator can ask for, because you find out within a week which of your numbers you can actually act on.
Relay Commerce
General Manager
3 Shopify apps, full P&L
Product, Eng, CS, Marketing
The Reporting Layer
One repo, one pipeline, one dashboard, built alongside the job rather than instead of it.
Ingestion
Ten live sources: GA4, PostHog, Redash, Stripe, Shopify Partner, Intercom, HelpScout, Customer.io, Ahrefs and Sheets. Every job version controlled and read-only.
Store
A dedicated analytics store with row-level security on every table. Never the production app databases.
Surface
Sales, product, support, finance and engineering views, each built sitting with the person who would use it rather than from a written spec. That is why they get opened.
Loops
A customer health worklist that assigns at-risk accounts to a named owner and notifies them in Slack. The dashboard stopped being a place people had to remember to visit.
Knowledge
A versioned knowledge base syncing to the app, so the context behind a number travels with the number.
Beyond My Own Division
The useful signal is not that it got built. It is that people outside the division asked for their own version of it.
Agent surface, company-wide
A live demo to the CEO led to a directional decision to make the agent surface a business-side interface for the company rather than one team's experiment.
Security model adopted as reference
The company's AI initiative took the read-only access model as its reference point for company-wide AI guardrails.
Handed to the data team
The prototype went to the data team so the views that proved useful could be rebuilt properly, on their terms.
Requested by another division
A second division asked for the same treatment, which is the clearest evidence that the format solved a real problem.
The Objection, Answered First
One person building on production-adjacent data is a bus factor and a security surface. That objection is fair, and leading with the answer rather than defending afterwards is what turns it from a blocker into a credential.
Every read runs through version-controlled scripts behind a read-only guard. The pipeline reads the products and cannot write to them.
Least privilege throughout. Reporting layers and a dedicated analytics store, never production app databases, and read-only credentials scoped to the minimum needed.
Row-level security on every table, and no direct database access from the browser.
Agents scoped to named tools, with output landing in a queue a human clears.
Built to hand over. The repo lives in the company org, and the position I take is that this is a company asset. Take it over whenever. I just want to keep evolving it.
The Operating Model
Four layers, written on one page, so the team knows what is expected without asking me.
Metrics
One place for the numbers the division runs on. Everything below reads from here rather than from a private spreadsheet.
Accountability
A named owner on every key result. I set the direction and own the outcome, and where a lead can carry it I get out of the way.
Roadmap
Initiatives per team, each tied to an objective, on a board the CEO and the team read from without a status meeting.
Cadence
A biweekly cycle with demos that show real output. The rhythm is the thing that makes the other three layers hold.
SEND ME YOUR KPI DEFINITIONS
I will tell you which two are lying. It takes about an hour.
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