YouSaid · the spoken record

Katie Dill

lines on the record: 98
first: 2023-10-15
most recent: 2023-10-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think one part is being clear on what impact means. Because I do think that in some companies, impact is like, okay, what business metric did I move and how much? And there are certainly really important impact projects that folks can have that maybe they're multi-quarter, you know, multi-year. And so maybe you didn't move this incredibly important business metric in one quarter, but actually like the work that you are doing is instrumental to the success of the business. So there's that. And then like you said, you know, there are perhaps quality efforts that are harder to measure or they're longer term, but they are still impactful. So I think number one is that, you know, when you're thinking about how to come up with the rubric for how you're going to judge performance is just like really honing in on what does impact me. And then a lot kind of comes from that and being able to in the celebrate and recognize.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That somebody should consider in the organization is just like you have those examples. Like, every company does where quality leads to better business outcomes. And to talk about those and make them known, because I think it's actually a false belief that it's like one or the other. Are we going to work on quality? And it doesn't move the metrics and where we do. Some of them are longer term. And so you have to look out for a while to see that change and the beliefs of your customers or how often they're sharing your product or how often they're succeeding in what they're trying to do. But some of them are short-term impacts. And that is an important thing for people to be aware of because it will give them ideas of like, oh, we could do this in our team too. We could have a higher quality product and actually move the business metrics.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of it though is showing how it moves metrics Because I think that is a dangerous belief that is absolutely out there, as we talked about earlier, but that actual quality improvements do increase growth. They do improve the bottom line, right? That like, you know, for example, we saw that folks were reaching out to support because they didn't know the state of how one of their invoices was performing. And when we dig in, we realized it's like, well, we had a button that looked nice, but it wasn't super clear. And so they didn't know how to access the thing that they were trying to do. And so by improving that, we decreased the need for them to have to reach out, which is clearly not their in a want to have to call somebody to, you know, find the answer to their problem. And so with that, we made an improvement and we, of course, improve the bottom line because of that. So I actually think that maybe one of the steps.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that kind of commitment to building great things that they will use that in their decision making. And then, of course, it needs to be very clearly advocated for at the highest levels of the company. And with that, I think that kind of like fuels people's thinking as they're building their plans. But there is iteration in the plans. And we do have multidisciplinary people making the plans together. So it's like, oh, okay, are we advancing these features? Are we going to be building growth? And, you know, is that improving the quality as well? And so I think that's how we kind of together get to it. But we don't have like, there's no formula that we ask people.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen some organizations talk about when they're doing planning, do your OKRs for quarterly or half year or whatever, recommendations of like 10% of your time should be spent on fixing things and 20% on growing things and the rest on keeping the lights on, whatever it might be. So yes, I've seen different companies build a recommendation based on certain percentages of how they think teams should be spending their time. And we at Stripe think that first and foremost is that we have to make sure that folks are number one hired with the fact that they have great judgment and care for what they build and they take pride in it. That's like number one. And then you can give a lot of trust to people based on.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I think people can get a little tied around the axle on how you're measuring it and like to your point, especially in subjective things. And it's just like, oh, you know, it's like, well, is it really at six or is it a seven? And we didn't want people to get a little too worried about, you know, how does like it's not meant to be an objective quantitative score. It is qualitative. It is judgment. We hire people for judgment. So we want them to bring that to the conversation. And so that's, you know, how we chose the score because we felt that would actually lead to quicker but like straightforward opinions and decisions.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way the rubric works is so that, and we have a template for the friction log. So people fill out a friction log and it'll be like screenshots and then what they experienced. And then there is a kind of a tool to tag for each kind of moment. It's like, oh, that was a nice touch. Or that is not great. We should consider a fix or different levels of kind of severity of like, oh my gosh, P0 bug, we need to fix this right now. So they'll tag for different moments in the journey. And then there is a summary score at the end, which is based on a rubric that we have that talks about the importance of quality from the point of view of usability, utility, desirability, and actually going to that next level of surprisingly great. And then we'll ask them to score on a whole what”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really hitting the mark. And so we will debate that there. And in those meetings, you'll have yes, myself, David Singleton, Will Gabrik, who leads product and business, and then various leaders from the organization that might be relevant to that area. We are trying to give people kind of like insight to what's happening across. So again, it's a multidisciplinary room. Trying to keep it not too large because obviously it can be hard to have discussion, but it is very valuable to make sure, again, that we have the perspective of product marketing, the perspective of engineering, the expected product in the room as we discuss what our quality bar is.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What? Do they really do that? Like, you know, can we, you know, how can we make that better for them? And so it's, I really love the multidisciplinary approach. But then when we do the calibration after the team has done these walkthroughs and they've kind of gotten their own perspective and they fill out the scorecard based on our rubric for quality, we will come together in what we call PQR product quality review. And they will take us through what they have experienced and then they'll talk about like, and so this is why we've scored this a yellow or a yellow green. And then we might have a conversation about that. It's like, well, actually, that felt a little worse than you've described it. And actually, like, I think that, you know, we probably need to put more urgency on solving that. Or in some cases, it's like, actually, that was pretty great, you know, if you think about, you know, what we're trying to help somebody achieve at this moment, like that actually is.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for what we're doing for each team is they do themselves together. So bare minimum, it should be the engineer, product manager, and designer doing it together. And the reason why we like to see it happen together is, again, as we've talked about before, is that people bring a different perspective to something. And so let's say, you know, somebody in the room might be like, oh my goodness, the load time didn't feel really good there. And like, oh, whoa, that like the way we're stating this is not consistent per page. And that's not on our design system. So it is really powerful to have folks come together and do it. And in fact, David Singleton, who you mentioned, he and I do these things very regularly too. Like this is like kind of outside the essential journeys program, but like he and I walk the store and we'll just pick random flows and go through it together. And I can't code, but he can. And so he'll do the code part and I'll be, you know, sitting there.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are constantly looking at our processes and trying to figure out how we can make them better and better as an organization as we've grown, things need to adjust. We today are doing it quarterly. And the quarterly aspect of like walking the stores by no means meant to be like, that's the only time people do it, but that is the time where, you know, we're looking for like update your scorecard and share the information in a dashboard where everybody can see. And that is feeling right now to be the right cadence because that's enough time that there can be material differences made. And so you can see in kind of like the scores evolve over time, but also frequently enough that, you know, you're not missing that perhaps there's been a step back since. But of course, my real hope is that these happen, you know, they're happening weekly just perhaps in different parts of the organization.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And yeah, to your first point, 100%. They're all just forms of input. I'm definitely not saying do this instead of user research, do this instead of data. It's like, you know, these things in additional sense. And I do think what's so powerful about doing it firsthand is that although I am like the biggest supporter of user research, even hearing somebody talk about an experience while that is like really, really powerful, feeling the pain firsthand is just like this next level of visceral understanding of like, oh, this could be better. And your users, you know, they might not always say what's missing or what's wrong or maybe they don't, you know, they don't know that certain aspects of it could be better. So yeah, having or, you know, point of view on that in addition to the user research and what you've heard from them directly is really, really important. But you asked about how often we have, you know, as I've mentioned, we”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how well does that performance align? And are we doing it consistently across the rest of the organization? And so we do something very similar. We calibrate these scores because what we're really trying to do is not just the 15 essential journeys and the owners of those. We want to actually like up level and bring more shared understanding of our quality bar across the company. And so these moments of calibration kind of start that. And then having leaders do this, you know, kind of like creates this number one cascades this idea of the importance of owning your journey. And then also has upstream impact because when people see the state of products in the wild as a user would, they learn a lot about what are some of the bigger opportunities that we can make to make the product better. What are some of the things that maybe we want to change in our process to make sure that we have, you know, even”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google trying to understand something goes to the website. They end up on docs, they end up in the dashboard. And they're seeing it as a user might. And with that, they're able to find the entailments of the experience that may or may not be working. And they jot that down. They file bugs. They reach out to the teams that may own the different parts of this experience. And then they score it. And then on again, a regular cadence, we come together in almost like a calibration where we meet and we talk about the score of their work. And it kind of relates to performance reviews, right? Like, you know, performance reviews, managers are assessing an individual's performance, which is hard, right? Like it's like there's some subjectivity to it, just like understanding quality can be. But what we do as managers is we calibrate. We come together and we talk about like, okay, how well is this, you know, is our interpretation of our ladder's document.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Journeys, the things that we know matter so deeply to our users, and we must get right at the highest level of quality possible. And so those 15 things then each have engineering, product, and design leaders that are responsible for the quality of those products, and they review these journeys, what we call walk the store, where they review them as if they're walking the floor of their store on a regular cadence. And they friction log what they experience, which I know David Singleton talked about on your podcast. And they will write, you know, what they have seen, what's working, what's not working. And they're viewing this from, you know, they're trying to put themselves in the shoes of their user. This, of course, doesn't replace user research, but it, you know, kind of substitutes it and it adds to that. And so they go through the experience and noting what's working and what's not working. And very critically, it's a journey. So a lot of times, you know, it starts from internet search.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oftentimes, in parts to be able to focus on their key business areas. That's a very good thing because they get focused and they know what they're building towards and they get expertise and they're laser focused on that. And so ideally they move faster. But what also happens is that they get so focused on that, they forget about that piece of the journey and how it all fits together and not recognizing that part of their product experience is intimately tied to another. So what we did was we set out to number one increase the kind of awareness and accountability of leaders to own their journeys. And so what we have established are, you know, we started with 15 of our most important user journeys. 15 is somewhat of an arbitrary number. It's a number that we can kind of keep track of, but also has pretty good breadth, but it's certainly not comprehensive of all the most important things. But 15 of our critical.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bring that approach to understanding the quality of the product. And so our goal was to set out to try to solve the fact that products can be shipped and they could be at their highest game when you ship them. They go through all the processes internally to be a high quality thing. And then it gets out into the world. And then over time, the quality regresses. And some of the reasons for that is that other things are being shipped. And it's kind of like, again, back to an analogy of a house. Imagine you have one room where you redo the molding and, you know, you paint the little aspects and you put like new plates on the lights. Now all of a sudden that room is great, but it makes everything else look worse. And the whole composite is worse. And so that is something that can happen to products is actually they, you know, kind of get worse over time. And then you organize a company.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then lastly, the thing that I've learned that will lead me to the example that you were asking about is that in order to build quality, you really do need to understand it also from the user perspective, which kind of gets me into my fixation with journeys, because that is how a user sees it. The user very, very, very rarely just like deals with any aspect of what you build in isolation. There has to be a moment where they learn about it. There has to be a moment where they get to know it. And then there's a moment where they actually decide to use it. And then, oh, something just changed. And now they need to use that product in some other way. And so you have to understand it from that point of view to really understand whether or not the quality is there. And I think that's a critical piece of building teams that have empathy for their users. So we have been operationalizing that. All the things that I just mentioned, but like one of the key pieces is to, you know, kind of.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up in the outside, and like how clear you all are, and how you're talking about it, and the standards that you set inside and are constantly reminding people of in the way that you communicate inside will then eventually show up outside. So of course, keeping your talent bar high and then thinking about how those things really need to be cared for, that shared care across the organization is number one. Number two is that there needs to be some amount of vision and alignment. So, you know, if you hire all the best people in the world and you just like set them out to go.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I get into that, one of the things that has been driving a little bit of this process and the way that I've been thinking about how we can build better things at Stripe is actually I've been just talking to people, talking to different design leaders, product leaders, engineer leaders at different organizations and trying to understand how they go about it. And there are a couple of themes that are clearly coming through. Number one is that quality is definitely a group effort. You know, you're sunk if you think that like you can just like hire some incredibly talented person and then like, and they'll do it, that'll be fine. You know, the rest of us will do what we're doing and they'll do it or that it's just like one organization that's going to look out for quality or, you know, QA is going to solve it all for you. It really does need to be an organizational and a group effort. And if you think about like, you know, the way that you run, you know, the internal functions is going to show.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would love to tell you about something that we've actually rolled out pretty recently that I'm extremely excited about the positive impact on.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's the creativity of the work, but it's also just like the technical kind of power of the way that we show it. How we've actually operationalized the way we do that is that we have design and engineering and our product partners and product marketing work really, really closely on this. And actually, it's one of the few teams where all of these things report, well, not all of them, but most of those functions report into one place. So engineering and design actually all report up into the design organization when they work on the website. And together, quite literally, as we were talking about earlier, if we were physically together, they would be sitting side by side and, you know, they're batting ideas back and forth because, you know, the engineer on the team has a great idea for how we could go about executing on it. And the designer on the team has another idea and had a, you know, push that a little further. And so that kind of rapid cycle of iteration is really, really powerful, especially when we're trying to move quickly, but at an extremely high standard.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's definitely a couple things we could talk about in terms of operationalizing quality because the gravitational pull is to mediocrity, right? Like, you know, it is very easy to fall into a path of a baseline where what is required to go to that next level where something feels truly great is certainly a lot of effort and it's a concerted effort. And I will definitely say we are a work in progress. We have not nailed all the things. And it is an ongoing pursuit of excellence. And so the way that we build the website is that we certainly do put a lot of care into what we're putting out into the world. And we view it as a articulation of how we care about our users in all that we provide for them. So we take that very seriously. We try to kind of meld art and science.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, nice. Okay. All right. Well, then lastly, quality is a matter of pride. Beauty is a matter of pride. If we put that in kind of care into our work, more people will want to work with us because they want to see their time spent in the care for their craft recognized and utilized and see that that can be put together into something really impactful. And so we really put that on the pedestal because we know how much it matters to our users and how much it matters to the people that work with us. Beauty is an important part of it all.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, all right. Well, it's that good. It's that good. And I wish I could remember which episode that was, but it was, I forget. But anyway,”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like the care that we put into them. And actually, a perfect example of this. Have you seen the show The Bear? No spoilers, but all I have to say is peeling mushrooms. You know what I mean? Yeah, such a good example.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one, things that are more beautiful increase trust. You see that we've put painstaking detail into this and we care about the details of how something works. And that gives you assurance that we care about other details that you can't see too. And secondly, it is easier to use, as I've mentioned, it gives better user outcomes. What we're trying to do is we're trying to equip businesses to make the right decisions to be more successful at what they do. And by bringing a interface or our invoices or whatever it might be to be more beautiful and more easy to use and more trustworthy, that will lead them to better outcomes. Thirdly, strongly believe beauty begets beauty. And so when our business users or the consumers see the beauty and the care and the creativity that we put into the things we deliver, then that again reassures them of, you know,”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make things easier to use, more approachable, more compelling to use. And a good example of how something looks and how something is structured and how that can translate to that. Also from the book Beauty, they mentioned that they studied the tweets that came from people that were traveling through Penn Station versus Grand Central. If you've been to those places, I'm sure you know where I'm going with this, which is just like people tweeting from Penn Station. It was just like more negative than the people that were tweeting from Grand Central Station that tended to be much more positive and optimistic. And so, you know, the things that you create have this impact. And if you're thinking about like, I want people to enjoy using my product. I want them to feel at home in our product. Of course, beauty is a part of it. And this matters deeply to us. And I know, you know, as a financial infrastructure company in the B2B space, some may assume that that doesn't matter as much, but it's actually a key priority for us because”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that we're talking about this because I feel like there's probably some people listing that are like squirming in their seats of like, you know, like beauty. We're talking about business here. And I mean, that's, which is great. And actually, there's a fun fact. It's Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh have a book called Beauty, as I would highly recommend it. Very, very worth the read. But one of the first things they talk about in the book is that from the 1800s to the 2000s, the use of the word beauty in books that have been digitized by Google has decreased pretty dramatically. And it's aligned with this idea of like, well, functionality is king. Functionality is what matters. And as if people think about functionality and beauty as like two opposite things. But with the whole book talks about is that like, no, they're not two opposite things. Functionality is important. And actually, beauty enhances functionality because it does.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does not lead to a high quality product, so it is like the combination of these things, and so it's like stepping towards that. But if you really want your product, those features to be utilized for all that they're worth and to actually gain such esteem and respect and reuse, taking it to that next level and thinking about, you know, how do I make this actually an enjoyable use and that it really feels like it's meant for me and it maps to my mental model, that craft and that quality of the execution of those details is going to be paramount.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what the outcome that we seek. So, this is again why I was talking about how important it is to have multidisciplinary teams that work closely together, because sometimes we are the checks and balances in the conversation. But I do think if we can align on what are we trying to build? Are we trying to build something great, then we can recognize the fact that it isn't just that utility isn't a credible important part of that? But so is usability and so is desirability because these things together make something truly great. And so in beauty is an important part of that because it does make things more useful. It does make things more accessible. And that with these things kind of coming together, you can build towards something better. I think that beauty on its own or just craft on its own without utility. I mean, that's like, I don't know, that's like Blu-ray or Path, right? Like that.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, a pet peeve of mine is this way of talking about things as there's business goals and there's design goals. Because I think maybe the first conversation one should have is that what are we trying to build towards? And I would think that folks that want to create really impactful products, they want to create quality products and that they want to create things that actually serve their customers in a positive and beneficial way because they know that will build a stronger business in the long run. And so yes, there may be slight prioritization details different through the process where a designer might be thinking more about the emotional experience and how somebody feels because that's oftentimes how they're wired and that is an important lens to bring on it. Whereas somebody else might just be like, well, just make the button bigger and they'll click it more often.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Stripe is used by millions of businesses globally, small and large from early stage startups to SMBs, larger organizations and enterprises like Amazon and Hertz, Shopify, Spotify, X, which I believe you use. The work that we do ranges. We have checkout flows. So when someone's paying online or in person, or we also provide a suite of financial automation tools so that you can run your subscriptions business and recognize your revenue and receive tax and essentially manage the complexity of the financial space through powerful tools that hope to make your job easier so you don't have to sweat the details of how these things work.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The quality of the checkout experience through details small and large, we have seen a 10.5% increase in business' revenue from an older form of checkout to a newer form of checkout. And those little details matter to have such a material impact on one's revenue.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the biggest examples that I've seen of business impact through quality is actually in the checkout experience. So we've done research on the checkout experience in some of the top sites, e-commerce sites, and we found that 99% of the top e-commerce sites have errors in their checkout flow that actually hinder more impactful, more seamless quicker checkout and therefore higher conversion with their customers. And these small things, really like their quality issues, they're just that if you really understand what a consumer is trying to get out of the experience, then you can make it better. And so we have been maniacally focused on that over many years, trying to make the checkout experience so much better for businesses and their consumers. So by improving”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lastly, I'll just say that I know there's this saying of it's growth versus quality, but like quality is growth. And if you think about how you can make your product easier to use and more understandable, that will, of course, drive people to use it and use more of it and take, you know, have a better experience with it that they'll want to talk about with others. In fact, at Stripe, our growth team, I would say, is like pretty much maniacally focused on building better experiences because we've seen it tied directly to our business metrics. We have things that we've improved on in our onboarding flow, for example, to make it easier to understand the products, understand how they work for your different use cases such that then we have seen activations increase because we've made these quality improvements that are just directly tied to.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was no competition. The competition was a horse. So no big deal for, you know, cars today, it's like the stitching, the choice of the leather, the sound of the door, like these distinguish, you know.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really, in the belief that these things, it really does add up to a better outcome in the end. And so a longer, healthier life. And so hopefully I get myself together and go to the gym. And I do think some of the best companies on the planet think that way. And I recognize that our customers don't always ask for it. I mean, you might see it in support cases, for example. Clearly, they don't know how to use this next step. And that is probably a quality issue. And that, you know, they might be asking for in a more improved features. But some of the levels of quality, the level two and three and four, you might not get direct asked for. But I guess give you another analogy. If you don't have competition, that's fine, right? Like if you think about the first car, I'm sure that wheel is really hard to turn. And I'm sure that seat was not comfortable. And, you know, you could have any color you want as long as it's black, right? But like,”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to have that impact. But the companies that know that quality is non-negotiable. It is a long-term necessary aspect of what they build. Don't play that numbers game or that they, you know, what they do is they recognize that it is absolutely functionality, but the quality of those features that is actually going to get usability, desirability in their product. And actually, I think it's kind of like an analogy for going to the gym or working out. I don't know about you, but literally every time I think to do this, there's like a fight in my head of like, do I really need to work out today? You know, is this one day, you know, going to give me six-pack ads? Like, of course not. So why go? Why not just like skip it today? But of course, like then at some point, hopefully I realize that it's like, well, if I skip it today, what's to stop me from skipping it in another day?”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't believe that there are disciplines that just don't care about quality. I think it's more about that prioritization and kind of like what you talked about is just like, is it really worth getting something to that exceedingly well state? Or is it, you know, what about just like another feature? And getting that being seduced by the chase of another feature versus actually taking your features to a level of being great, that is hard. And I get it when you look at your user base and they're all shouting from the rooftops for this additional feature. Of course, you're going to want to prioritize that over something they've never asked for. And then the other thing would be you end up with like you've got three things that you could possibly do to make perhaps the next stage in your product development. Two of them you know you can measure and they're going to line up to business goals and one of them you can't like of course that's going to be enchanting to want to go after the things that you can actually measure and you know that they're”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and I think this is like an age-old question that I don't know if we'll ever go away. And probably because, you know, the quality bar, you know, keeps evolving and keeps rising. But I think first to kind of level set before we kind of dive into that, I would say that there are levels of quality, right? There is the like, does the thing work? Does it provide some sort of value proposition? It like executes on its job. That's like baseline quality. Next is it like, does it do it exceedingly well? Is it like error free? Actually, maybe that's not even exceedingly well, but just like error free and it actually works in a well-rounded way. And then beyond that, like level three, level four, level five does it exceed expectations and it does something that you weren't even seeking for as a user and i do think like the levels of quality should be based on user expectations”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team that you work on because both are really important communities to build for slightly different reasons. So yeah, Thayer was a good spot for that.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I got there, I think there was a little of like, you know, design is just going to sit with design and not necessarily in close proximity with engineers and product managers, et cetera. And one of the things that I believe as a necessary part of building a high functioning organization is that one, you know, building together is important. So like having engineers and product managers and designers be together, have shared goals, and align on that and be able to just look over each other's shoulder and talk about things is important. So sitting together is important. However, that fair thing that you're talking about actually was something that I was very devoted to, which is bringing design together at key moments multiple times throughout the week to also build the community in design. Joe Bot and Airbnb once said, it's like, well, what t-shirt do you wear? Like, what team are you on? And I was like, you wear two t-shirts. You have two t-shirts. You have the design t-shirt and you have the like marketplace t-shirt or whatever, you know, cross-discipline.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there were five of them seated around the table, and they had a pack of papers in front of them, and they went on taking turns, you know, quite reading from the papers, all the things that they saw that I was doing wrong and all the things that they didn't like about me. And, you know, it was a really hard moment. I went through all the usual kind of like stages of grief when one hears feedback, which is just like, you know, immediate want to like respond to be like, no, like, you know, well, there was a good reason for that. And like, that's not how it actually was. And this is why I did that. But luckily, I had, you know, goodness, I had the sense to just like listen and not respond in that way. I mean, clearly what they were telling me is that, you know, that was one of the things that was missing. And so I heard them out and took it all in. And regardless of each individual thing, what was.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About a month into my time there. I got a meeting on my calendar Thursday 8 30 a.m. was an hour and a half with half of the design teams. That was five people and our HR partner. Usually, yeah. And I remember this so vividly and remember walking into the office and all the rooms in Airbnb's office are very unique spaces that look like Airbnbs. But of course, this was the one room with like all white walls and just like a gray, you know, flat rectangle table. And I walked into the room.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it happened in my early days at Airbnb. So I was hired to take on the design organization or the experience design organization. That's basically the product design team, which was 10 people at the time. And so they had been reporting directly to one of the founders. And they were going to start reporting to me. And during my interview process, I learned a lot about what was working and what wasn't working. And some of the trials and tribulations with the design organization and its collaboration with others. So it seemed like there was room for improvement in how engineering and product management and design all work together. And there was also really low engagement scores in the design team. And so it kind of came in ready to go and excited to try to help make some change based on all the things that I had learned from various leaders and people across the company. And I came in swinging, ready to go. And then.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting with the easy questions. All right. Yeah. No, I'm happy to talk about it because frankly, it was the biggest learning experience of my leadership career, or at least that happened in one moment.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The use of the word beauty in books that have been digitized by Google has decreased pretty dramatically. And it's aligned with this idea of like, well, functionality is king. Functionality is what matters. And as if people think about functionality and beauty as two opposite things. Like, no, they're not two opposite things. Functionality is important. And actually, beauty enhances functionality because it does make things easier to use, more approachable, more compelling to use. And the other piece of it that is not talked about in business as often is just the importance of how people feel things that are more beautiful increase trust. You see that like we've put painstaking detail into this and we care about the details of how something works. And that gives you assurance that we care about other details that you can't see too.”
2023-10-15 · Lenny's Podcast · Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source