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🤿 hot paths

🤿 hot paths

what happens when everyone is a 7/10 designer

Ridd
September 19, 2025

In an AI era, what does it look like to reimagine e-commerce from first principles?

That’s the question Shopify’s Chief Design Officer, Carl Rivera, has set out to answer so this week’s episode is all about Shopify’s big bet on design and craft as the ultimate differentiator.

We go deep into:

What happens when AI makes everyone a 7/10 designer
What most design teams get wrong when casting vision
Why every designer at Shopify is learning to ship to production
Carl’s thesis for why designers are severely undervalued in the market
Why Shopify acquired Molly Studio and what it means for how the org works
+ a lot more

🤝 WITH LOVABLE

I didn’t see this coming…

But I’m all in on using voice as the primary way I interact with my computer (especially when prototyping with AI).

It’s way faster than typing and perfect for brain-dumping context.

I used to have to use a separate tool but now Voice Mode is built directly into Lovable so building your ideas is as simple as having a conversation.

It’s just another reason why Lovable is my first choice for AI prototyping👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

What stood out from my chat with Shopify’s CDO

1 — Why design is undervalued

Carl argues the most valuable people in tech today are the foundational model researchers. But that only matters for a handful of companies in SF. For everyone else, design is the most valuable talent.

As code and even design get commoditized to a baseline, the question becomes: when software is essentially free, how do you make something people will actually pay for and keep coming back to instead of rebuilding themselves?

That’s where Carl views 10/10 design as the differentiator.

2 — Everyone will be a 7/10 designer

Carl jokes that he’s already a 7/10 lawyer with AI 😅

In the same way, everyone will be a 7/10 designer soon.

But AI outputs are only as good as the inputs. That’s why Shopify is doubling down on its design system (a big trend I’m noticing lately in these interviews 👀).

“I want designers to focus an extreme amount of time honing the design systems and components to enable people that are not designers”

Carl Riverea

A stellar design system empowers non-designers to ship 7/10 work which frees up the best designers to focus on “hot paths” 👇

3 — Prioritizing “Hot Paths”

Carl doesn’t want “peanut butter design.” Instead of smoothing everything to an 8/10, he wants a few of the most important flows cranked to 10/10.

I'm okay with us not spending the same amount of time on some of the other things because I much prefer an experience where certain things are just easy to do, but not much else. We made it possible but we didn't make it incredible. As long as some of the things that you keep coming back to have been perfected to a point that when you hold it, you know that it's premium software”

Carl Rivera

When talking to Carl it’s clear his goal really is “premium software”. Not “premium software measured by growth in GMV”. He doesn’t care about justifying craft with business metrics.

“I feel sure enough that if you build an experience where end to end you have these like moments of delight and thoughtful interactions that create a bond with the user, then eventually that's going to benefit the company in some number of ways. And that's enough for me.”

Carl Rivera

This gives designers permission to prioritize creativity and draw outside the lines of the system when working on the flows that matter most.

“I'm giving you permission to also draw outside of the lines and break some of those same systems that we help build together to create experiences that you can't quite get to by just assembling Lego blocks. That's becomes the difference between designing as a designer and putting design to use as someone else.”

Carl Rivera

I saved another 5 takeaways from this episode 😅 there’s seriously so much in here but I’ll save the rest for the full conversation 👇