Vanessa Lee

Vanessa Lee is a distinguished product executive and the Vice President of Product at Shopify. As a senior product leader reporting directly to the CEO, Vanessa oversees the strategic vision for Shopify’s core product portfolio, managing a platform with a $130B+ market cap and driving the innovation that fuels its 27% year-over-year revenue growth. Her leadership is currently centered on the RenAIssance of commerce, where she leads the development of Sidekick, Shopify’s AI assistant, and the broader shift toward Agentic Commerce. Vanessa’s teams build the end-to-end experiences—spanning online stores, retail POS, and developer platforms—that empower millions of entrepreneurs to scale their businesses.

A robotics engineer by training and a two-time Y Combinator founder (Canvas Labs, Sage Home Care), Vanessa brings a builder’s mindset to global leadership. Her approach is defined by courage as a service—the willingness to make high-stakes, technical decisions that prioritize long-term platform health over short-term gains. Before Shopify, she founded startups in the senior care and logistics spaces and held product roles at Microsoft. With over a decade of experience in the Shopify ecosystem, Vanessa specializes in transforming complex technical infrastructure into seamless tools for entrepreneurship, ensuring Shopify remains the world’s most versatile operating system for business.