I’m Blake Waldron.
I build for commerce.

Brands put a lot of thought into personalising their storefronts. I founded Checkout Components to bring that same attention to checkout.

We help Shopify Plus merchants show each customer a checkout that makes sense for them: relevant upsells, useful content and the fields they need to complete their order. The aim is to help more customers complete their purchase, increase average order value and make the store easier to run.

That includes post-purchase content and a clearer view of what happens at checkout. We surface session and conversion data by customer segment, with more detail than Shopify’s native reporting. I work across product and engineering with our team to turn that understanding into improvements merchants can make to their checkout.

Good execution starts with understanding the problem.

I joined Convert Digital as an engineer and progressed through Head of Engineering to Director of Engineering. Over seven years, I’ve overseen more than 400 Shopify Plus store deployments and led a global team of 76 engineers across Australia and APAC.

AI is making it faster to produce code. My focus is on turning that speed into useful work for merchants: understanding the problem, designing the systems around it and giving our engineers the context to make good decisions. I talk with customers every week. On a migration from Adobe Commerce or Salesforce, those conversations help us understand how the business operates, which systems it depends on and what needs to work differently on Shopify.

I built Horizon Wind so we could spend less time repeating the same foundational work on each project. We can apply a merchant’s branding to a shared set of sections, and improve accessibility and testing across that shared base. I’ve taken the same approach with our headless development platform. Productising that repeated work gives the team more time for each merchant’s specific needs, and a shorter path from an agreed requirement to something they can use.

I’m leading our AI rollout across the organisation and building internal tools that help different departments capture clearer requirements. The aim is to give engineers a better understanding of the work before they start, with less time lost clarifying or redoing it. I want improvements in how we build to reach merchants sooner, as changes that help their businesses.

I get the most out of AI when it can work with the same systems and context the team uses to run the business.

Every system at Checkout Components has an MCP server. Those connections give Claude access to the tools and information behind our work, so the whole team can use it. It reduces the effort of gathering context and moving information between systems, and makes AI useful in the work people already have to do.

In my own development work, I think about the feedback loop from an idea to a working product. A clear feature specification gives an agent something concrete to implement. Code review and automated QA then give us something concrete to learn from and refine. I use agent orchestration and loop engineering to connect those stages, with each result informing the next step.

I work in code every day across Checkout Components, Convert Digital and new ideas. What interests me is building a way of working that helps the whole team turn an idea into something useful. That includes engineering, product and revenue operations: the value is in giving people the context and tools to solve the problem in front of them.