Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:11:47 · Marvin Schwaibold, Aaron Epstein
[00:11:47] S1: Toby, at the beginning... At some point last year, basically said, we're entering a new era, and that future needs to be designed. And that that was basically it. He's like, I wanna design I wanna design for the future, and I need to hire good designers who can help me paint a picture. And when we see that picture, we'll we'll know what it is, and we can and we can we can go down that route. And I think that was the... That's the mandate at Shopify. Like, design is very much more in the foreground. It's a very honest organization that's very self aware. It's a founder led, engineering led organization, and design hasn't always played the role that it's playing now. Design is very much helping shape the narrative of where the company is going and the level of craft and pride we're taking towards the tooling and the software that that we're building for our merchants, and that's beautiful to see. And that was one of the reasons we wanted to join because we felt while we were having fun designing websites for other studios like Collins or Spencer the illustrator, we also wanted to have a larger impact and and and and see if our strategy would hold up on interface paradigms with millions of users versus the the few users, I guess, that would scroll around the Spencer website. [00:12:53] S0: Right. And so it's a different set of challenges. [00:12:54] S1: It's different set of challenges.
00:12:54 · Marvin Schwaibold, Aaron Epstein
[00:12:54] S1: It's different set of challenges. [00:12:55] S0: The design studio work that you did was create a new site or something to, display work or work on a product or something like that. Talk about how it's different now. Shopify has millions of users, and there's a lot of money at stake with every design decision and interaction that you work on. And what is your process like now being this internal design studio? And and how do you interface with the rest of the organization? And and how do you interface with users especially too?
00:13:20 · Marvin Schwaibold
[00:13:20] S1: So I will say, basically, for now, our studio exclusively operates within Sidekick, which is the AI infrastructure layer of Shopify. Mhmm. The whole team works extremely close with the rest of the design organization, and it's a very beautiful, like, interplay, which is, I think, in general, how these studios work or how this works more successfully. I've been in positions in also previous careers where if you're more isolated, it's always more difficult to ingest into the company and and have a large impact in in the company. I think at the moment, we're very ingrained in the current workflows and ingrained in the timelines and in in in our roadmap. And it's... And it and it just... It requires a lot of a lot of experimentation, honestly. Like, up leveling the interface was easy for us because we have really talented designers who rebuild parts of the interface in Figma, and then using AI, we're we're able to port that over into very tangible prototypes extremely quickly. And as we all know, prototypes are a million times more useful than any PRD document you can write. Mhmm. Those spread around the company like wildfire. And if Toby sees a prototype that he likes, then we can go off and build that. And I feel with some of the AI mutations work we've been looking at at Shopify, we can show some of that later. It feels the same. We have ideas in our head, it's extremely easy for us right now using the current the current technology to just simulate it all Yeah. And generate prototypes. Yep. Where in the past, at Molly, a lot of the work we were doing was was by hand. Our sheets were designed by hand. All the animations were done by our developers. Art direction might have been my idea, but other than that, there's, like, a thousand counterparts that you have to interact with. Right now, I'm seeing one off armies or or teams of two going off and and and doing the work of many because the tooling is just allowing us to to do that. Yep. And that's that's making it a lot easier to get buy in because I can show up with a prototype and get people's attention faster than I can if I have an idea and I have to get a whole team rallied around an idea.
00:15:26 · Aaron Epstein
[00:15:26] S0: Could you show us some of the the work that you guys have been building at Shopify?
00:15:29 · Marvin Schwaibold
[00:15:29] S1: This is basically a a a redesign and facelift of our current admin experience with a with a new with a new home home design and an overall an overall facelift of basically the entire product, which we've been working on, at the moment. I think one of the more interesting things, that we've been exploring right now is just, how psychic and the merchant interact with each other. We have this concept of suggestions, psychic suggestions on on the home feed. These suggestions are brought to the merchant by us. We've identified opportunities and benefits that the merchant could do inside of their ecosystem, inside of of their of their of their universe, and we can show those to the user. And then as the user interacts with these suggestions, we basically kick off a conversation with Sidekick. We can directly manipulate the admin dashboard for the user, and we can show show those changes to a user. So we're showing a user right here. We think you should rewrite or re rewrite the description of of your of your product. Here's the here's the here's the suggestion that we think you should do. You can publish these changes, and, basically, through a conversation with Sidekick, you've directly manipulated your store. And it's... The concept is more, can we bring UI to the user and into the... Into into context versus having the user click through click through the interface? At the end of the day, there's a world where a a merchant can spend a lot more time on the home surface and use Shopify as as a dashboard to delegate and interact with with Sidekick and have Sidekick directly manipulate the store. Right now, what you're looking at is is is still a prototype environment. This is... There's a dev UI panel inside here, and, basically, we... We're we're building all of these. The the the design team is building all of these changes and and demos and and and ideas right into the interface here so we can just test and build on top of it.
00:17:28 · Aaron Epstein, Marvin Schwaibold
[00:17:28] S0: Mhmm. [00:17:29] S1: And it's it's become this beautiful process where once a demo is at a point where we kind of all align, everybody branches off and builds a version Mhmm. Of something that they think they... That brings value. And then we all come back together, and it actually lives all inside the same the same demo and the same link. Yeah. And it's just a beautiful way to to to to share ideas and and and context. [00:17:49] S0: You said designers are building this [00:17:52] S1: Yeah. [00:17:52] S0: In here. A lot of times, designers are designing. And they're not building, but it's... In in Shopify and your team and you, you are building a lot of the stuff that you are designing so that you can test it, so you can prototype it, you can see it on live live data, live experiences. Yeah. And that's a huge part of of nailing it and building something useful and making sure that it's great. What was your evolution from, you know, designing in Figma Yep. To now you are not just designing, but you're actually creating it out into the world to be able to test it and doing that full loop yourself.