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Remember how the CEO of Shopify went viral for his AI memo?
Well I interviewed the VP of Design at Shopify (Darrin Henein) to learn how recent shifts are impacting the way they practice design 👀
We also go deep into what it takes to create a culture of excellence and how designers can make a strategic impact at a company like Shopify.
Some highlights:
What makes for a great design critique culture
Darrin’s expectation for how designers prototype
How Shopify’s new AI mandate impacts designers
Traits Darrin notices in promising younger designers
What designers can learn from the best communicators at Shopify
Why Darrin believes designers need to think beyond static prototypes
+ a lot more
🤝 WITH MOBBIN
I’ve been designing for a long time but somehow I only signed up for Mobbin this year and I cannot believe it took me this long.
It’s a total cheat code being able to find inspiration for basically any pattern, any product, any flow…
It’s fast. It’s beautiful. And I already cannot imagine designing without Mobbin.
It’s the first place I look at for inspiration 💡
Click the link to get started—I can’t recommend it enough 👇
🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS
My takeaways from the VP of Design at Shopify
1 — The ROI of research has changed
We like to frame user research as a tool for understanding and advocating for the user (and that’s true).
But the rise of UXR was also economic. Software has historically been expensive to build. And research was how we de-risked big bets when the cost of getting it wrong was high.
“In the past, you would do research and usability tests because building that solution was quite expensive. It took time, engineering capacity, and once you committed down a road, it was hard to go back and change your mind.”
Now that AI is driving the cost of software toward zero, the equation has changed 😬
We no longer need to spend a month choosing the right idea when it’s just as easy to try all of them and iterate faster than ever.
“AI accelerates that process even further. Going from an idea to something you can evaluate is much faster—and the fidelity of what you’re evaluating is also higher.”
This is why I never used the word “research” when talking about Inflight. There’s an implied slowness that feels out of step with where the industry is headed.
UXR isn’t going away… but its ROI is shifting, and the way we practice research needs to shift with it.
2 — Illuminating concrete elephants
Teams often think they’re aligned… until it’s time to build.
Darrin likens it to a group of people in the dark, each touching a different part of an elephant: one feels something thin and papery, another grabs what seems like a rope, another finds what feels like a tree trunk.
They all think they’re dealing with something entirely different.
The designer’s job is to turn the lights on…to make the idea tangible, visual, and unambiguous.
That’s why Darrin pushes teams to prototype at high fidelity (and fast). This is the quickest way to expose misalignment and get real feedback.
Earlier in my career the design process increased fidelity over time. But now with AI… functional prototypes are the starting point, not the finish line.
“gone are the days of sticky notes on windows and gray wire frames and marker drawings because everything today needs to be in service of the outcome”
The goal isn’t to be “correct” out of the gate… it’s to illuminate the elephant :)
3 — Bottoms-up strategy
At Shopify, strategy doesn’t trickle down… designers are expected to pitch ideas and make a strategic impact.
“Everybody can contribute to our strategy… everybody can propose things they think we should be doing.”
Shopify even built internal tools around it. Every project starts as a proposal, giving designers a natural way to participate in strategy.
And as AI 10x’s the number of ideas we can explore, knowing which ones are worth pursuing matters more than ever.
“There is still tremendous value in the vision, the taste, and the strategy behind which ideas you pursue—and how they manifest.”
There’s a whole segment on communication best practices and how designers can get buy-in for their ideas but I’ll save that for the full episode because I gotta catch a flight ✈️
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Framer → How I build my websites
Genway → How I do research
Granola → How I take notes during CRIT
Jitter → How I animate my designs
Lovable → How I build my ideas in code
Mobbin → How I find design inspiration
Paper → How I design like a creative
Raycast → How I stay in flow while I work
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