Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft)

**Katie Dill** (0:00)
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, it's 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 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
Today, my guest is Katie Dill. Katie is Head of Design at Stripe, where she oversees product design, brand and marketing creative, web presence, user research, content strategy and design ops. Katie was previously Head of Design at Lyft and Head of Experience Design at Airbnb. She's built and led design teams at three different hyper growth companies, seeing the team scale at least 10X, and two of which, Airbnb and Stripe, are some of the biggest and fastest growing companies in the world and also the best designed products. In her conversation, Katie shares stories of trials and tribulations of leading large design teams, processes she's put in place for operationalizing quality, how she thinks about quality and beauty very practically, how design can directly lead to growth, and examples of this that led to big lift and conversion at Stripe, plus a math formula she uses to increase team performance, how she suggests organizing your design and product teams, what to look for in design hires, and so much more. I was really lucky to get to work with Katie while at Airbnb, and I am so excited to have her on this podcast. With that, I bring you Katie Dill, after a short word from our sponsors.
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