Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft)

October 15, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe, discusses leading design teams through hypergrowth at Stripe, Airbnb, and Lyft, emphasizing trust-building, the business value of quality design, and processes to sustain high standards across multidisciplinary teams.

Early leadership lesson: Listen before changing

In her first month at Airbnb leading a 10-person design team with low engagement, Dill received direct feedback from half the team in an intervention-style meeting. She recognized she had come in "swinging" without earning trust or bringing the team along. Shifting to listen to individual motivations and goals while still driving necessary changes improved engagement scores to the company's best within months. She applies this by prioritizing listening in new roles to align on shared goals before imposing changes.

Quality as growth driver

Dill argues beauty and high-quality execution enhance functionality, usability, and trust, countering the view that they oppose business priorities. Levels of quality range from baseline functionality to exceeding user expectations. At Stripe, checkout improvements—fixing errors in 99% of top e-commerce sites—yielded a 10.5% revenue increase for businesses. Growth teams focus on better experiences, as quality ties directly to activations and metrics; it's not features versus polish, but quality enabling feature adoption.

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What you'll learn

1 *(00:00:32) **Intro and Katie's Background**
2 *(00:01:25) **Airbnb Design Intervention: Leadership Lesson**
3 *(00:06:08) **Team Structure: Sitting Together and Dual Communities**
4 *(00:11:16) **ROI of Design: Levels of Quality and Gym Analogy**
5 *(00:16:08) **Checkout Impact and Design Lens**
6 *(00:21:40) **Defining Beauty: Enhances Functionality and Trust**
7 *(00:26:20) **Operationalizing Quality: Website and Frameworks**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Katie Dill is the Head of Design at Stripe. Previously, she was Head of Experience Design at Airbnb and Head of Design at Lyft. Katie has been named one of Business Insider’s 10 People Changing the Tech Industry as well as one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business and received the Girls in Tech “Creator of the Year” award. In today’s episode, she shares:

• What makes a design great

• Advice on building high-performing teams in hyper-growth environments

• A pivotal lesson in leadership she learned at Airbnb

• Stripe’s focus on quality and how it’s tied to growth

• A formula for removing organizational friction

• How to increase productivity

• What to look for when hiring a designer

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Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-beautiful-products-with

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Where to find Katie Dill:

• X: https://twitter.com/lil_dill

• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@lil_dilly

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-dill-79168b3/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/