We recently announced Flex Comp, our new approach to compensation that puts product thinking at the forefront of how Shopify employees (a.k.a Shopifolk) get paid. Flex Comp gives Shopify employees the ability to choose how they want to allocate their total reward between base salary, Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and Stock Options today, with new features like Shop Cash in the future. We’ve removed one-year cliffs on equity, and because life changes all the time, we allow employees to change their allocations a few times a year during allocation windows. All of this is handled through a clean user interface that’s simple to use and makes it crystal clear how much an employee earns with the allocation they’ve selected.

The Rewards Wallet where Shopifolk allocate their total Flex Comp rewards.

For employees onboarding into the new comp system, adjusting their total rewards allocation by dragging a slider to the right or left is incredibly simple; but for development teams to actually build this one-of-a-kind system, it’s been anything but.

Naturally, when it comes to compensation, we can’t share every detail of the project. That said, this project taught us many lessons and inspired creative solutions that we think anyone setting out to build something innovative can benefit from. In this post, we’ll share some of the technical challenges we solved along the way to take Flex Comp from a blue-sky idea of what compensation could be, to a real system used by Shopifolk all over the world today.