20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product and design leaders of our time. Today is a very special show. I was first joined by this guest over nine years ago when he was the founder of Tictail, a company that Shopify later acquired. Today, he's the chief design officer at Shopify, and I think Carl is one of the most thoughtful product and design leaders in tech today, and this was such a special discussion to make happen. But before we dive into the show today, on this show, we care about velocity. Most teams lose it in code review, not in writing code. Now, CodeRabbit fixes that. The second a PR opens, it leaves clear, line by line comments, calls out what the change might touch, and offers one-click fixes. You can teach your organizational standards using your own custom instructions, such as cursor or clawed rules, and enforce them on every PR. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 13 million PRs and installed on 2 million repositories used by over 100,000 OSS projects. If you want to cut code review time and bugs in half, try a free month at coderabbit.ai with the code 20VC. And while CodeRabbit keeps your code clean, WarpDev makes it fly. AI coding is everywhere, but most of it, honestly, it's pretty chaotic. Code that is almost right, but you don't really understand. Well, that's why Warp exists. With Warp, the old lines between Terminal and IDE disappear. It's a seamless environment for coding with agents where you can prompt, plan, review and ship production-ready code, edit files in-app, review diffs as you go and deploy straight to production without switching tools. Warp tops the benchmarks, literally number one on Terminal Bench, top five on Software Engineering Bench verified and is trusted by over 600,000 developers and used by 56% of the Fortune 500 engineering teams, making it one of the fastest growing AI companies with revenue growing 30x this year. With Warp, you don't just get speed, you get code you can trust. The average developer saves five hours a week with Warp, that's almost half a day. Try Warp for free at warp.dev forward slash 20VC and to get pro for only $5 for your first month, use the code 20VC, that's 20VC.

**Carl Rivera** (2:29)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:33)
Carl, I cannot believe this dude, you were episode number 10 We have now done 3000, it was actually 10 years ago. So thank you so much for joining me again today, my friend.

**Carl Rivera** (2:46)
Yeah, we were both young and here we are, grumpy old man.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:49)
Dude, we were both so young, but I was speaking to your co-founder before Tictail, before this show, and he said we had to start here. He said, Oliver Davids, trademark, how does it influence your mindset? I had absolutely no idea and I have no idea what he means. So can you enlighten us?

**Carl Rivera** (3:09)
Oliver Davids belongs to the murky parts of my career. I was running an agency together with Kai Drovin, who I then started Tictail together with, and we did a bunch of stupid things. The one thing we did was that we landed this job to basically produce a huge event in Stockholm with a bunch of artists like Swedish House Mafia, a bunch of artists playing, and we were supposed to find an event photographer to document this whole experience. We were 18 and super young and cocky and thought we knew how to do everything. So we were like, F that, we don't need an event photographer. We're going to document this whole thing ourselves. But the people paying us insisted that we had a professional photographer. So we made up this name, which was my second name, Oliver, and Kai's second name, David. And we were like, well, we have this incredible photographer that's coming in. Oliver David is going to shoot the whole event.
And we had all of these like, we had to meet all of the artists in the green room, and we had to get perfect shots of them when they were playing. And then we had to go around with this big set of Japanese journalists and show them around and take photos for them. And our photos were published in these Japanese lifestyle magazines under the name Oliver David. So that was my very short stint as a professional photographer.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:22)
And it taught you that if you're not sure, just lie.

**Carl Rivera** (4:26)
Totally. Well, if it did help me anything, it was just like, just go. Like, just go with it. Like, something great will come out and it's like, I don't know, trust your instincts and take risks. That was always kind of the engine.