Katie Dill
@lil_dill
Head of Design at Stripe. Board member at Magnific. Previously: Lyft, Airbnb, and Frog. Mom. Pilot.
1.1K Following 39.4K Followers
If we only use AI to make the things that we already make, just faster, then we're definitely missing out on the most interesting part.
From my talk at @lennysan’s Summit, here are four ideas for raising the ceiling, not just the floor:
- Have a point of view [5:38]
- Encode your standards into the machine [9:07]
- Don't confuse done with good [12:21]
- Unleash creativity and artistry [16:19]
Full talk here:
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If you want to lead one of the frontiers of agentics, you’ll want to apply to @danimalnelson’s team
We're hiring Staff Product Designers!
The @link team is on a tear with agentic commerce right now. Rolling out agent wallets for @Muse, @bot, Instinct and so much more.
We're only getting started! DMs open.
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Software is increasingly treated as disposable in the AI era. Yet we spend half our waking lives looking at screens! We don’t want to spend that time with zombie products—monotonous, vacant, and uncared for. We want products with soul. 💜
I go deep on this in my talk from @lennysan's Summit:
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Three more talks from Lenny & Friends Summit just came online:
1. Katie Dill (@lil_dill), Head of Design at @Stripe: Raise the ceiling — How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with Al
2. Geoff Charles (@geoffintech), CPO at @tryramp: The limiting factor — How to design an AI software factory for speed
3. Marty Cagan (@cagan): Strong opinions, loosely held
Watch all of the talks here:
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The small Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in London's Postman's Park is quite moving: an assembly of earnest Arts and Crafts tiles commemorating people who died saving the lives of others.
George Watts, the creator, in 1887: "My proposal, as you know, is plainly this: that the memory of the deeds of heroism constantly recurring in our everyday life should be perpetuated and honoured as such deeds should, for they illustrate the character of our people as a nation of great acts." And elsewhere: "It is a great pity that they should only receive the recognition of a newspaper paragraph, and be forgotten next day."
I'm often struck by how figures in this period across many countries seem solemnly concerned with the character of the nation.
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The Lenny & Friends Summit talks are coming online!
The first two just went live:
1. How to Build Products at the Moving Frontier w/ @danshipper
2. The Last Roadmap w/ @clairevo:
The rest dropping over the next few days
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Like a muscle that atrophies under a cast…
New essay. I am worried that we might entrust more and more of our thinking to machines, and gradually cease to sustain the habits and institutions through which we had once cultivated our minds.
I am worried that we might entrust more and more of our thinking to machines, and gradually cease to sustain the habits and institutions through which we had once cultivated our minds.
Such a surrender might happen amid considerable prosperity and be celebrated, at every stage, as progress. Each concession would come with an excellent justification: an economy of effort, a saving of time or an answer superior to anything we could produce ourselves. Only slowly would it become apparent that, in relieving ourselves of the burden of understanding, we had also diminished our capacity to govern our affairs. And by then, a preference for machine rule might seem entirely sensible. It would materialise not through violent and forced takeover, but by our own volition, with our own diminished abilities the strongest argument for such an arrangement.
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📣 Announcing: @Meta and @stripe are partnering to make it easy for businesses to accept agentic payments using the @Muse Connector Platform. (This going to unlock many new money muse cases!)
Learn more:
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We're hiring 2 designers on my team at @stripe
Mid-level Designer —
Senior Designer — &
High-craft, web-focused roles on a team that cares deeply about the details.
Apply here:
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“We don’t want to let the quality bar slip just because we’re shipping more and faster. It just became a question of designing a system to enable that at this newer scale.”
Excited to share our latest case study with the @Stripe design team!
They gave us a behind-the-scenes look at tools they’ve built across product, brand, and content that allow them to do Stripe-level work at an incredible velocity.
AI also clearly lets more people there participate in shipping great product, lets designers go way broader in their explorations, and even lets designers/engineers do work that simply wasn’t possible before AI (wait 'till you see how their brand team uses AI)
Thanks @lil_dill and team for showing us what embracing AI effectively can look like!
0:00 – How AI is changing design at Stripe
1:48 – Using ProtoDash for high-fidelity prototyping
4:52 – Maintaining Stripe’s voice at scale with Dante
8:03 – Designing Stripe Press book covers
9:45 – Why now is a creative renaissance
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Nuttin but good vibes at 4000 feet, @clairevo. Thanks for the new hat!
BTS on Lenny’s Summit! This scene brings me so much joy. Well done, Stefan and team!
100+ iterations on design frames, 70+ on videos and mixing with AI models, and asking countless questions like, how can we make this scene more alive but not overdo it? Does this the fire move realistically? How far can we push it.
Loved pulling this together.
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It was an honor and a pleasure for @stripe to plan, design, and produce Lenny's Summit with @lennysan. Together, Lenny and the team absolutely crushed the experience and production! The presenters were inspiring, and the folks in attendance were too. I'm excited for the videos to come out.
Thank you for bringing us all together, @lennysan. This is a truly awesome community.
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Still processing from yesterday's event (one of the most meaningful days of my life)— more to come—but a few quick things for now:
1. Thank you to everyone who came. You are what made it special.
2. There's so much need for IRL community. I've rarely felt this kind of pull for anything I've done. Wow.
3. All of the talks will be posted to my YT channel in the coming weeks. Get excited.
4. An unbelievable thank-you to the @Stripe team for helping me put this event on. It takes something special to create an event with 1,000+ PMs that has such great vibes. If you think they're great at payments infra, they might be even better at design and event production. High talent density over there. It's no coincidence that I've had more people from Stripe on my podcast than any other company. Thank you, Stripe.
(A few photos from the event, more to come.)
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Does the public prefer traditional architecture? Half a century of surveys find:
- Between 60 and 95 percent prefer traditional architecture;
- This pattern holds across gender, class, race, nationality and political views;
- More traditional densification schemes seem to attract remarkably high levels of survey support;
- Laypeople and design professionals respond dramatically differently, with professionals far more favourable to modern styles.
Research is still at an early stage, and many questions remain. Personally, I am particularly interested in how the public would respond to a non-traditional but richer and more decorative style? I think they might like it, but we don’t have hard evidence yet.
But the results are already puzzling. Why do people end up buying buildings that are so different to the buildings they say they prefer? How did we end up in this odd situation? What can we do about it?
Read more in @RobertKwolek's definitive review of architectural visual preference surveying.
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Massive thanks to @lennysan and team @stripe for an incredible Lenny & Friends Summit!
It truly was a SUMMIT - the pinnacle of what a tech gathering can be. An astonishing collection of the finest tech leaders and inspiring conversations that I’ll carry with me into my roles.
Lenny - your community demands a TWO-day summit next year! 🙏🏻
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Lenny & friends bts
Lenny's Summit: where you can't walk 5 steps without running into someone building something awesome.
I need to get better at taking more usies.
"Refuse to confuse done with good."
"Give them room to explore and protect the strange."
"The best practices haven't been invented yet."
Katie Dill delivered all three today at Lenny & Friends, talking to leaders about how to treat designers right now. I got chills for real.
We're all out here building with AI and choosing, whether we know it or not, between raising the bar and regressing to the mean for the sake of speed. Katie's talk was a clarion call for choosing the harder one.
There's a theme emerging across the talks: how to do fewer things better, even as we're able to do everything faster. More on that later
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