Funny I read exactly the opposite. The advice is probably good for any large organization, having worked at very successful startups with a few hundred people

Funny I read exactly the opposite. The advice is probably good for any large organization, having worked at very successful startups with a few hundred people and mega-corps ... you absolutely have to understand how the decision making works if you want to get anything done. FYI 'politics' is not bad, it's just all the bits that are unspoken about the operating nature of a company. That is literally the one thing which I wish I had understood when venturing into a much bigger company. In fact, what he should really say is 'I wish Shopify would formalize' the nature of how decisions are made etc.. Edit: I think younger people with less familiarity about the 'real nature' of large organizations might possibly misread that because it's sometimes hard to understand how some companies work, and it's easy to be cynical (frankly, many companies are 'political' in a bad way). In reality - this 'advice' is the revelation that anyone in middle management makes when they get into their 30's. Everything is making sausage, nothing is obvious except in hindsight, getting anything done is kind of hard, the company has limited ability to innovate on the margins, and social organizations are made of people, which means 'it's political' that doesn't mean it's bad, it just means you have to think about it differently. Middle management is hard, especially for those in staff positions without 'direct power' and are not high enough up to have meaningful legitimate authority for the scope of a project.