Each day at Shopify I was so energized to come to work each day and inspired by our team of intelligent and unique individuals. Even though I was 300 kilometres from the closest Shopify employee, I could feel the culture and knew immediately that I was part of something bigger than each of us. Every time I met with my lead or a fellow guru, you could hear the passion in their voices, their high standards and immense pride in what we do each day was infectious and I wanted to surround myself with it.
In the spring of 2015 I was invited to attend Retail Tour in New York City as a Guru. At this point I had worked with Shopify for six months and this would be the first time I would meet the team. The instant connection between myself and the other Gurus was fantastic and the bonds we felt even though we had never met was something special. In June 2015 I was fortunate enough to be invited to San Fransisco Retail tour and once again it was an amazing experience. We had thousands of merchants through the event and almost all of them had a chance to chat with someone from Shopify, their positive feedback was amazing and really made me understand why our offline events are so important.
In the summer of 2015 I happily joined the Squad Lead team and was mostly excited for the chance to be able to focus more on the part of Shopify that I love so much, I embraced every opportunity to pass Shopify culture and a connection to our merchants onto the Guru team. During BFCM I helped to create Guruland emails complete with cartoon Guru characters, pump up/relax Spotify playlists and wellness tips. I also worked on a hackdays project called Merchant Stories designed to inspire and remind our Gurus why our work is so important and who we are helping everyday. My most recent project is to help the transition of new Gurus from training into their sqauds, we've built a training program with five days of sessions to increase confidence and help new Gurus understand the expectations and operations of Guruland.