Insiders

Katie Dill explains how thoughtful design helped Stripe, Lyft, and Airbnb earn user trust and build successful products. She argues that founders shape design culture by setting a high bar, making room for careful work, and hiring people who care about users and craft. She offers a product quality checklist: utility, usability, and craft: and recommends examining products critically, observing users, and developing taste through examples. At Stripe, embedded teams, ongoing user feedback, product reviews, and friction logs help keep experiences coherent and improve them over time.