Katie Dill
Head of Design at Stripe (formerly Lyft, Airbnb)
Katie Dill is Head of Design at Stripe, overseeing product design, brand, marketing creative, user research, content strategy, and design ops. She was previously Head of Design at Lyft and Head of Experience Design at Airbnb. She has built and led design teams at three hypergrowth companies, scaling them 10x each.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Katie Dill shares the design team intervention story from her early days at Airbnb that became the biggest learning experience of her leadership career: she came in swinging with changes but hadn't earned trust first. She argues that beauty and functionality are not opposites — beauty enhances functionality by making products easier and more compelling to use, and painstaking detail signals to customers that you care about things they can't see.
Leadership Principles
- → Beauty and functionality are not opposites — beauty enhances functionality by making things easier to use, more approachable, and more compelling
- → Before making changes as a new leader, earn your team's trust first — bring them along with you
- → Painstaking design detail signals to customers that you care about the things they can't see too
Notable Quotes
"The use of the word beauty in books digitized by Google has decreased dramatically. As if people think about functionality and beauty as two opposite things. No, they're not. Beauty enhances functionality because it makes things easier to use, more approachable, more compelling."
— On why the tech industry undervalues beauty in product design
"They went on taking turns quietly reading from the papers all the things that they saw that I was doing wrong. What was very clear was that I hadn't earned their trust. I wasn't bringing the team along with me."
— On the design team intervention at Airbnb that became her biggest leadership lesson
Want to know how you compare?
Take the Assessment