为 AI 时代重新构想 Shopify 的设计

欢迎收听 Dive Club。我是 Tommy，这里是设计师永不停歇学习的地方。今天，我们邀请到了 Shopify 的首席设计官 Carl Rivera。我们将深入探讨他的愿景——将 Shopify 打造成最优秀的设计师创作毕生杰作的地方。今天我们将讨论拥抱 AI 工具、重组设计部门以及更多话题。但首先，我想听听为什么 Shopify 收购了设计工作室 Molly。

Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Tommy and this is where designers go to never stop learning. Today, we're talking to Carl Rivera, the chief design officer of Shopify. So, we're diving deep into his vision to turn Shopify into the place where the best designers go to produce their life's work. Today we're talking about embracing AI tools, restructuring the design org, and a lot more. But first, I want to hear why Shopify acquired the design studio Molly.

我认为，在这个许多人认为不再需要设计师、AI 能做一切的时代，Shopify 却选择重新引入联合头衔，并确保设计在公司内部拥有最崇高的平台，这很有意思。原因在于，Shopify 在 2006 年创立时，真正让它胜出的正是设计——它是唯一让 Shopify 从所有竞争对手中脱颖而出的东西。它是第一个易于使用的电商平台。当时，Toby 的联合创始人 Daniel Wan 是 Shopify 的首任首席设计官。多年来，这种设计优势让我们占据了领先地位，并使 Shopify 构建的各种能力成为差异化因素，成为用户选择我们的原因。如今，Shopify 在市场上的地位令人难以置信。我反复提到的一个数字——即使听过很多次，仍然让我震惊——是 Shopify 占据了美国电商的 10% 以上。每 100 美元中就有 10 美元。它可能是对创业曲线影响最大的单一公司，真正改变了社会层面的行为。但在这个旅程中，在达到如此巨大的全球影响力之后，我个人觉得我们失去了设计作为关键差异化因素的地位。现在使用 Shopify，它是一个非常易用的平台，但并没有留下深刻印象。它还不是一个让你因其设计而记住的体验。而随着 AI 的出现，所有这些不同的体验——比如我们如何与软件交互、界面应该是什么样子——都需要从头重新构想。如果今天重新开始，Shopify 会是什么样子？这正是我被赋予领导的机会：在 AI 时代的电商中，从一张白纸、从第一性原理重新构想 Shopify。如果让设计引领方向，完美的电商平台会是什么样子？这就是我们与设计团队在 Shopify 开启的使命。这非常令人兴奋，我们能做的事情和取得的成就是无限的。

So, I think it's interesting to think about this moment in time when many people are sort of taking the position like we don't need designers anymore. AI will do everything. To think about the fact that Shopify takes this moment to reintroduce the co-title and to really kind of make sure that design has the most elevated platform to stand on inside of the company. And the reason, right, is that when Shopify first started in 2006, the thing that actually made Shopify win, like the thing that made Shopify the Shopify we know today was design. It was literally the one thing that set it apart from all of its competitors. It was the first e-commerce platform that was easy to use. And back then, Toby had a co-founder, Daniel Wan, and he was the original chief design officer of Shopify. And then over the years, this sort of design advantage put us in pole position and it allowed all of these different capabilities that Shopify built to start become differentiators, the thing that people came for. And today it's insane to think about what Shopify is in the market. One number that I keep coming back to and even though I've heard it so many times, it still kind of blows my mind is that Shopify is over 10% of US commerce. $10 out of 100. It's probably the single company that has done the most to bend the curve of entrepreneurship that have really shifted behaviors at a societal level. But in this journey and kind of getting to this point of this enormous global impact, I personally feel that we kind of lost design as a key differentiator of what we have to offer. Now when you use Shopify, it's an incredibly easy good platform to use, but it's not the thing that leaves a mark. It's not an experience that you remember for its design yet. And now with AI, all of these different experiences like how we interact with software, what an interface is supposed to look like kind of needs to be reimagined from scratch. Like what would Shopify look like if we started it today? And that's the sort of opportunity that I was offered to lead: to reimagine Shopify from a blank canvas, from first principles, in this sort of AI era of commerce. If design is allowed to lead the way, what does the perfect e-commerce platform look like? That's sort of the mission that we're embarking on with design and Shopify. And this is super exciting, it's just limitless in what we can do and achieve.

从第一性原理重新构想 10% 的电商绝非易事。这到底意味着什么？跟我聊聊你的策略吧。我是说，对于如此雄心勃勃的事情，你从哪里开始？

No small feat here to reimagine 10% of commerce from first principles. What does that even look like? You know, so talk to me a little bit about your strategy. I mean, where do you even start for something that ambitious?

嗯，我认为这正是为什么我们要用设计作为工具来进行这个练习。设计有一种不可思议的能力，让人们共同想象未来。作为一家公司，我们可以写无数文档，一份接一份的简报，解释对我们重要的事情。我们可以制定 KPI 来描述我们试图达到的目标。但每个人脑海中对于这些目标在体验、策略、用户实际得到的东西上意味着什么，都有不同的理解。设计让我们能够共同想象未来，因为我们都经历过这种情况：走进一个房间讨论想创造的东西，离开时却对那意味着什么有着完全不同的想法。但一旦你制作出一个公司前进方向的北极星——一个视觉化的、人们可以点击和体验的东西——突然间，讨论就变得丰富起来。这是一种高保真的对话，我们可以说：“哦，我原来不是这样想象 AI 在这个场景中向客户呈现的。”所以，我们实际上将设计视为一种工具和策略，用来推动公司内部正确的对话，帮助我们描述前进的未来。当然，在做这件事时，你会考虑所有显而易见的事情，比如 AI，但要超越今天大多数人最终采用的层次化实现方式——比如我们已经构建了所有能力和工具，然后在上面加一层 AI，希望它们能融合——而是开始思考什么是真正的原生 AI 体验。当界面从零开始就考虑到这些能力的存在时，它们会如何改变？

Well, so I think this is actually the reason that you want to go through this exercise using design as the tool. Design has this incredible capability to let people imagine the future together. We can as a company write an endless number of documents, just briefs on briefs on briefs explaining the things that are important to us. We can create KPIs that describe the goals that we're trying to get to. But we're all going to have different ideas in our minds of what that actually translates to in terms of an experience, in terms of tactics, in terms of the thing that our users get to hold. What design allows us to do is to imagine the future together because we've all been in this situation, right, where we've gone into a room and we talked about the things that we want to create and we left that room having completely different ideas of what that meant. But once you produce a northstar of where a company is meant to go, something visual, something that people can click around in and experience, now all of a sudden the debate becomes rich. It's a high-fidelity conversation where we can say, "Oh, that's not how I thought about how AI is going to show up to our customers in this context." And so really, we're thinking about design as just a tool and a strategy to drive the right conversations throughout the company to help describe the future that we're heading towards. And when you're doing this, of course, you're trying to think about all of the obvious things like AI, but going beyond the kind of layered implementation that most of us end up in today where sort of like, oh, we had already built all of the capabilities and all of the tools. Let's smack some AI on top of it and hopefully they mesh, but instead start to think of what are truly native AI experiences. How does interfaces change when they're built knowing that these capabilities exist from ground up?

快速插播一条消息，然后我们继续。现在你可能已经知道我有多喜欢 Granola 了。所以，我要把它交给我最喜欢的设计师之一 James McDonald，让他分享他的体验。他说：“Granola 是目前最好的 AI 工具之一，它能在通话和会议中记笔记并存储起来供以后使用，这真的改变了生活，我完全同意。我现在简直无法想象没有 Granola 的生活。所以，如果你是一名设计师，你在讨论工作时不应该不用 Granola。他们为你和你的团队成员提供三个月免费使用。你只需访问 dive.comclub/granola 即可。我没想到这一点，但我完全支持将语音作为与电脑交互的主要方式，尤其是在用 AI 做原型时。它比打字快得多，非常适合快速记录上下文。但以前我必须使用单独的工具，而现在语音模式直接内置在 Lovable 中。所以，构建你的想法就像聊天一样简单。

Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. By now, you probably know how much I love Granola. So, I'm going to toss it to one of my favorite designers, James McDonald, to share his experience. He says, "Granola is one of the best AI tools out there, and the fact that it takes notes during calls and meetings and stores them for later is genuinely life-changing, and I couldn't agree more. And I simply cannot imagine life without Granola at this point. So, if you're a designer, you shouldn't be having a conversation about your work without running Granola. And they're offering three months free for you and anyone on your team. All you have to do is go to dive.comclub/granola. I didn't see this coming, but I'm all in on using voice as the primary way that I interact with my computer, especially when prototyping with AI. And it's way faster than typing and perfect for brain dumping context. But I used to have to use a separate tool, except now voice mode is built directly into Lovable. So building your ideas is as simple as having a conversation.

我看到 Shopify 做了很多实验，Twitter 上到处是各种随机演示。现在我觉得这说得通了，很明显，即使是自上而下，他们也强调：不，我们要真正尝试去发明未来，我们不会在这里求稳，即使已经有了现有的市场份额。

I've seen a lot of experimentation coming from Shopify, just random demos floating around Twitter. And I think it makes sense now where it's very clear even top down there is this emphasis on no, we're going to actually try to invent the future. We're not going to play it safe here, even with the existing market share.

完全同意。我们试图拥抱的就是一个非常生成式的“往墙上扔面条”的过程，对吧？我们不想太刻意，不想说“好，我们躲进小房间，花几个月时间，然后拿出一个答案”。那样行不通。如果你试图这么做，你肯定会翻车失败。而且，这也清楚地表明，这不是一个设计师脱离组织其他部分、独自摸索的练习。而是设计师可以掌握工具，通过与其他团队协作，推动快速对话和迭代，朝着我们试图达成的那个模糊目标前进。

100%. And the thing that we're trying to embrace is just a very generative spaghetti on the wall process, right? Like we're not trying to be precious here. We're not trying to say, 'Okay, we're going to go off to a chamber, spend a number of months, and come out with an answer.' That's not how anything is going to work. And if you try to do this, you're for sure going to drive off a road and fail. And by the way, that also makes it clear that this is not an exercise where designers are going to disappear from the rest of the org and try to figure this out alone. It's just that designers can hold the tools that through collaboration with the rest of the teams can drive rapid conversations and iterations towards this sort of ambiguous goal that we're trying to get towards.

那么为什么要收购 Molly Studio？这如何契合愿景？

So then why acquire Molly Studio? How does that fit into the vision?

当我接手这个角色时，我对自己说，我有三个目标要去实现。这三个目标是：我想创建一个公司，让世界上最优秀的设计师选择在这里工作，让他们能做出职业生涯中最好的作品，定义 AI 的未来交互模式。所以我想做的是思考如何提升公司的人才密度，以及如何创建一个更好地支持这种愿景工作的组织。对我来说，那就是一个更扁平、更流动的组织，也是一个更集权的组织。我的意思是，我想基本上解开大多数公司最终形成的非常僵化的团队结构——你被雇佣，被分配到一个团队，然后一辈子待在那个团队里，在一个逐渐变好的界面上工作。相反，我想有一些领域负责人，但他们手下有一批非常有才华的个人贡献者，他们可以随时将这些人才组建成团队，去解决我们最大的问题，这些团队可以跨多个界面工作，真正拥有整个用户旅程，而不是单个界面。我觉得像 Molly 这样的团队加入就是一个很好的例子。一个由超级战略性的个人贡献者组成的团队，就像工匠一样，既能思考产品是什么、战略是什么、我们要实现什么，不只是拿着像素，而是把握问题。然后不是在一个界面上工作，而是跨用户旅程，端到端地拥有一个体验。我用 Molly 来提升公司的人才密度，同时也展示一种工作模式：更集权但也更流动，我们不再那么依附于公司的不同领域或不同团队，设计师不仅能参与对话，还能引领方向。所以他们现在的整合方式是：他们将继续作为内部代理机构存在，继续作为这个七人团队，是一个全栈团队，包含动效设计师、开发人员、UI 设计师，但他们将与 Shopify 内部的所有不同人员结合，来增强我们现有的团队，让团队能更快行动、更大胆思考、探索更广阔的空间，并希望一起建立这种工作模式。

When I took on this role, I said to myself that I have three goals that I'm going after. And the three goals is that I want to create a company where the world's best designers choose to work, where they can produce the best work of their careers, defining the future interaction patterns of AI. So what I want to do is really then to think about how can we push up the talent density of the company and how can we create an org that better supports this type of vision work. And for me what that is is a flatter, much more fluid org, and it's an org that has much more centralization. And what I mean by that is that I want to basically try to unravel the very calcified team structures that most companies end up in where you get hired, you get attached to a team, you sit in that team for the rest of your life working on a surface that gradually gets better. And instead I want to have a number of area leaders but they have a bunch of really talented ICs and they can assemble those into sort of teams at a moment's notice to go after our biggest problems that can work across multiple surfaces and really own entire user journeys rather than single surfaces. And I felt that bringing a team like Molly on board would be a great example of this way of working. A team of just super strategic ICs like crafters that can think both about what is the product, what is the strategy, what is the thing we're trying to achieve, not just hold the pixels but hold the problem. And then work not on a surface but across a user journey, owning an experience end to end. I'm using Molly as a way to of course increase the talent density of the company but also to showcase a working model of more centralization but also more fluidity where we're less attached to different areas of the company or to different teams and where designers can not just participate in the conversation but kind of lead the way. And so the way that they're going to integrate now is that they'll continue to be an agency internally, they'll continue to be this team of seven that is sort of a full stack team with motion designers, developers, UI designers, but they'll couple with all of the different people inside of Shopify to augment those existing teams that we have, to come in and allow teams to go faster, think bigger, and explore a bigger space and hopefully begin to establish this working model together.

我认为多年来有很多关于设计师试图证明自己的存在和价值、试图量化设计的影响以及为什么我们值得在桌边有一席之地的讨论。看到像 Shopify 这样地位的公司非常明确地言行一致，真是太酷了，对吧？就像，不，不，我们正在优先考虑这件事。我们引进了 Molly。设计将引领许多不同的实验，这很鼓舞人心。我很感激你们对整个设计行业的影响。太棒了。

I think for years there's been so much discourse around designers trying to justify their own existence and worth and trying to quantify the impact of design and why we deserve a seat at the table. It's so cool to see a company in the position that Shopify is in very clearly put money where the mouth is, right? It's like, no, no, we are prioritizing this. We're bringing in Molly. Design is going to lead a lot of these different experimentations and it's just inspiring. I'm grateful for the impact that you all are having in the broader capital D industry. That's awesome.

是的，我完全同意，这其实是我一直以来的一个痛点。我职业生涯始于设计，但后来我出去创办了一家初创公司，最终被 Shopify 收购，然后我进入 Shopify，领导了几年产品。很多时候，当设计师出现在那些对话中时，他们不会谈论设计和体验有多棒，交互有多精炼，以及他们为了真正创造出令人愉悦和难忘的东西而花费的细节关注。他们会把对话重点放在“这个设计带来了这么多影响”上。

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more and this has been kind of a pet peeve of mine where I started my career in design, but then I went off to start a startup that Shopify eventually acquired and then I came into Shopify and I led product for a number of years. A lot of the times when designers would show up to those conversations, they would not talk about the design and the experience and how incredible it is and how honed the interactions were and the kind of attention to detail that they had spent on trying to really create something that was delightful and memorable. They would focus the conversation on this design drove this amount of impact.

是的。

Yeah.

然后我就想，是啊，那很棒。我们都应该推动影响，一起实现业务目标。但对我来说，当我们试图用业务影响的衡量标准来证明好的设计时，这恰恰表明了对工艺的巨大信心缺失。比如，你可以有非常糟糕的设计，同时也有巨大的业务影响。当然，我们都会努力朝着目标前进，帮助用户在平台上实现他们想做的事。但我在 Shopify 现在试图创造的环境是，最有价值的衡量标准是我们自己的，我们被允许完全相信自己的直觉，基本上行使我们被雇佣的权利——因为我们的品味、我们的观点，我们有权说“我们决定什么看起来好”。这就是我们要坚持的标准。这个东西感觉不可思议吗？这个东西会令人难忘，让人们想回来吗？这可能很难用转化率或 GMV 增长等来衡量。但我足够确信，如果你构建一个端到端都有这些愉悦时刻、深思熟虑的交互、与用户建立联系的体验，那么最终它会显现出来。最终它会以多种方式让公司受益。这对我来说就足够了。

And I'm like, yeah, that's awesome. Like we should all be driving impact and we'll all be hitting our business goals together. But for me, it signals this enormous lack of confidence in the craft when we're trying to justify good design by measurements of business impact. Like you can have very shitty design and have a great business impact, too. Of course, we're all going to try to drive towards goals and help users achieve what they're trying to do on the platform. But I'm trying to create an environment in Shopify right now where the most valuable measurement is our own, where we are allowed to fully trust our instincts and basically exercise the right that we were hired for our taste, for our point of view, and we get to say we get to decide what good looks like. And that is the bar that we're going to hold ourselves to. Is this something that feels incredible? Is this something that is going to be memorable that people will want to come back to? And that might be hard to measure in conversion rates or increase of GMV or whatever it might be. But I feel sure enough that if you build an experience where end to end you have these moments of delight, thoughtful interactions that create a bond with the user, then eventually that's going to show up. Eventually that's going to benefit the company in some number of ways. And that's enough for me.

为了不断提高工艺水准，你采取了哪些仪式或实践？

What are some of the rituals or practices that you have to put in place in order to keep pushing that bar for craft higher?

是的，我很高兴你问这个问题，因为我觉得很有趣，公司多么渴望想出各种仪式，多么渴望找到一种组织方式。比如每两三年，公司就会说：“这是我们的新组织方式。我们有五个不同的团队，分成十四个小组，每三周开一次会，有十六个不同的目标要评估。”每个人都感觉良好，好像我们做了管理，万岁。但现实是，如果你的公司超过十个人，你不可能有一个适合所有人的结构。我实际上认为，管理的工作不是强加那种结构——你有这些仪式、团队等等，然后你把一群人硬塞进去。而是做另一件事：理解我正在试图解决哪些问题，我这里有谁和我一起工作，谁是最适合解决这个特定问题的人。基于那个问题的成熟度、阶段、我们解决它的时间、这群人以及他们的特定技能，我们应该采用什么样的正确流程？我认为这就是管理的工作：能够有那种深思熟虑的方法，在临时基础上，为正确的问题和人员匹配创建正确的仪式、结构和流程。所以我认为这是一个非常动态的运动，而不是一个可以整体应用到公司的方法。

Yeah, I love that you asked that because I find it amusing how badly companies want to come up with rituals and how badly they try to come up with a way in which they're organized. Like every two or three years, companies will be like, 'Here's the new way we're organized. We have five different teams that have 14 different squads and they meet every three weeks and they have 16 different goals that they evaluate on some whatever.' Everyone feels good and it's like we did management. Hurrah. But the reality is that if you're a company bigger than like 10 people, you're not going to have a structure that's the right structure for all. I actually think that the job of management is not trying to impose that structure where you have these rituals and teams and all the things and you have a set of people that you just squeeze into it. It's actually to do the other thing: to understand what are some of the problems I'm trying to solve and what are the people that I have here that I work with and who are the best people to solve this particular problem. Based on the maturity of that problem, the stage of that problem, the time that we have to solve it, this set of people and their specific skill sets, what's the right process that we should employ here? I think that is the job of management: to be able to have that thoughtful approach where on an ad hoc basis you create the right rituals, structures, processes for the right problem per people fit. So I think of this as a very active motion and not one that we can apply wholesale to the company.

你引进最有才华的人，告诉他们做最好的工作，你不可避免地会得到一点他们的 DNA。作品上会留下一些指纹，这可能会导致标准化程度降低，但那是工艺的天花板所在。然后这种影响会扩散，带来更多优秀的工作，因为当你创造这样一个环境：优秀的人进来，他们被允许做到最好，其他人看到并看到可能性，这就会推动他们，提高标准，人们开始产出更好的工作，然后这种影响继续扩散，成为一种自我实现的伟大预言——伟大的抱负激发抱负。我们都在相互提高期望。

You bring in the most talented people and you tell them to do their best work and you inevitably get a little bit of their DNA. There's some fingerprints left on the work in a way that does lead to maybe a little bit less standardization, but that's where that ceiling exists for craft. And then that rubs off and it leads to more great work because when you create that environment where great people come in and they're allowed to be the best that they can be and other people see that and see what's possible, it pushes them and it raises the bar and people start producing better work and then that rubs off and it becomes this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of greatness where great ambition begets ambition. We're all kind of increasing our expectations on each other.

我想谈谈抱负这一点，因为你最近说的一句话让我印象深刻：你谈到设计师常常因为关注限制而低估了机会。所以我希望你能分享一下你的想法。

I want to talk about the ambition piece for a second because something that you said recently that really stood out to me was you talked about how designers are too often undershooting the opportunity by focusing on constraints. So I'd love it if you could share a little bit of your thinking there.

当你试图将项目规模调整到分配的范围时，你基本上会低估，你会创造各种自我强加的限制，只允许你考虑一个这么小的空间。所以我通常认为，当你接触新工作时，应该以不受限制的方式进行。你应该考虑所有时间线上的所有可能性，并构建出事物可能成为的北极星想法，因为从那里开始推理范围要容易得多。然后你就有了一个完整的画面，了解今天和未来存在的所有不同机会可供选择。你会发现，一些你预期会更晚发生的事情实际上今天就可以实现。这实际上与所有其他利益相关者——产品、工程和数据——创造了更丰富的对话，基本上就是走进一个房间说：“这是完整的故事。想象一下这可能是什么。现在让我们开始讨论今天、下周、下两周我们可以实现什么。”对我来说，这意味着当今世界上大多数产品组织完全搞错了时间框架。我们大多数人处理新问题时，会考虑中期——大约六七个月到一年左右——我认为这是最没用的时间跨度，因为它是你控制最少的。我们大多数人思考非常长远的未来时，我认为我们对世界的发展方向有一些想法。实际上，想象 20 年后的世界比想象 2 年后的世界更容易。趋势更多是关于宏观，而不是具体如何到达那里。而且我们也很容易想象 2 周后或 4 周后的世界。所以我基本上推动我们的设计团队做的是：考虑非常长远的未来——这个东西要去哪里？这个项目的北极星是什么？——以及非常短期的未来——我们今天能实现什么？——然后完全砍掉中间部分。

Whenever you're trying to size a project to the scope that it was assigned, you're basically going to undershoot and you'll create all of these different self-imposed restrictions that only allow you to consider a space that's this big, much smaller. So I generally think that whenever you approach new work, you should do it in an unrestricted way. You should consider all of the possibilities on any timeline and build out the northstar idea of what a thing can become because from that it's much easier to start to reason about scope. But you then have a full picture of all the different opportunities that will exist for you today and in the future to choose from. You will discover that some of the things that you had anticipated would happen much later are in fact available to you today. It actually creates a much richer conversation with all the other stakeholders as well, with product and engineering and data, of basically coming into a room and saying, 'Here's the full story. Just imagine what this could be. Now let's start to talk about what we can bring into existence today in the next week in the next two weeks.' What this means for me is that most product organizations in the world today get time frames completely wrong. Most of us when we approach new problems we approach them considering the medium term, the kind of six or seven months to a year or so, and I think it's the least useful time horizon because it's the one that you can control the least. Most of us when we think about the very long-term future, I think we have some idea of where the world is going. It's actually somehow easier to imagine the world 20 years from now than it is to imagine the world 2 years from now. The trends become more about the macro than the specific things that are going to get us there. And it's also very easy for us to imagine the world 2 weeks from now or 4 weeks from now. So what I'm basically pushing our design teams to do is to consider the very long term—where is this thing going? What's the northstar of this project?—and the very short term—what are the things that we can bring to life today?—and just fully cut out the middle.

在 Shopify，什么构成了一个引人注目的北极星？比如，设计师可以做什么来推出一个北极星，让人们觉得：“哇，是的，这很有道理。这实际上是我们应该围绕的东西。”你是试图实现一个北极星，期望它变成一个计划？还是试图推理一个你还不理解的类别？

What makes for a compelling northstar at Shopify? Like what could a designer do to put a northstar out into the world where people are like, 'Wow, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That actually is something that we should orient around.' Are you trying to bring to life a northstar with the expectation that it's going to turn into a plan? Or are you trying to sort of reason about a category that you don't yet understand?

你有不同的版本，对吧？当你试图为一个你真正想要实现的产品创建北极星时，比如我们想考虑 Shop 应用一年半或两年后的感觉。那么我认为重要的是它要立足于今天。你将要去的想象的种子要立足于今天的现实。它可能从相同的审美中汲取，或者从一些现有的功能和实用程序中汲取。当你只是想理解一个新类别时，也许你是在尝试学习新东西。也许有一天 Shopify 醒来，我们说，我们想超越作为商业操作系统的角色，也开始想象如果世界各地有一堆 Shopify 零售店会是什么样子。

You have different versions of this, right? When you're trying to create a northstar for a product that you actually want to bring to life, let's say we want to consider what the shop app is going to feel like a year and a half from now or two years from now. Then I think it's important that it's grounded in today. That the seed of the imagination of where you're going to go is grounded in the realities of today. That it's pulling from the same perhaps aesthetic or that it's pulling from some of the existing features and utilities. When you're just trying to understand a new category, maybe you're trying to learn something new. Maybe we decide that one day Shopify wakes up and we say, we want to go beyond being an OS for commerce and we want to also start to imagine what it would look like if there were a bunch of Shopify retail stores all around the world.

那么这种东西就更像概念车了——你完全忽略所有设计系统、所有现实约束，只是试图创造一个只用于引发讨论的产物，之后大概率会被扔掉。最终当你准备好时，你会从一张白纸重新开始，甚至不再看那个最初指引对话、勾勒商业机会的北极星。

Then something like that can be much more like a concept car, where you're really ignoring all of your design systems, all of the constraints of anything that is a seed of reality, and you're really just trying to create an artifact that will only ever be meant to be a piece of conversation that will most surely then be thrown out. And then eventually when you're ready for it, you're going to restart from a blank canvas and not even look at that original northstar that helped guide the conversation and outline the business opportunity.

在我自己的职业生涯中，只有很小一部分工作属于那种北极星式的工作。我很好奇你是如何从组织中把它激发出来的，尤其是当你强调要站在 AI 新交互模式的前沿时。这让我想起你另一句话，你说希望 Shopify 的用户体验在未来几乎像科幻一样。在文化层面，需要什么才能让设计组织如此前瞻，真正突破短期甚至中期的约束？

Such a small percentage of the work I've done in my own career has been that type of northstar work. I'm almost curious how you pull it out of the org, especially when you are placing this emphasis on wanting to be at the forefront of these new interaction patterns for AI. And it reminds me of another quote you had where you talked about how you want Shopify's user experience to feel almost sci-fi in the future. What does it take at a cultural level to get a design org shooting that far into the future and really pushing past the short and even medium-term constraints?

我认为这始于许可。始于公司说“去吧，拼命去，疯狂去，我们希望你探索。我们期待你带回想法。”然后是为这些想法创造成长和发展的空间。再然后是要认识到，当这些新思想的种子开始繁荣绽放时，你要把它们捡起来，在内部讨论，理想情况下也在外部讨论。我们在这方面做了很多工作，既在内部庆祝即使是探索性的工作，也越来越多地尝试推动进行中的工作，通过经常在社交媒体上分享内部文件，邀请人们进入 Shopify 幕后，让大家一窥 Shopify 的工作面貌。最后，这也归结于你拥有什么样的团队。很多我们给出其他解释的事情——我们说是流程、仪式、反馈或简报——几乎总是归结为：不，其实只是人。你需要聚集一个设计团队，他们是战略思考者，天生好奇，准备好拥抱所有这些新工具，并希望利用它们探索可能性的边缘。在某些情况下，那些在之前工作阶段表现出色、符合之前要求的人，不再跟得上——他们不想和我们一起踏上这段新的旅程。我认为所有公司都需要意识到这一点：你需要创建一个真正专注于绩效的组织，能够创造美丽的体验，能够跟上市场不断变化的期望，并准备好迎接变化。如果你没有，那么你需要改变组成，否则你不能期望另一端的工作会出色。

I think it starts with permission. It starts with the company saying 'go, like hell, go crazy, we want you to explore. We're expecting you to come back with ideas.' Then it comes down to creating space for those ideas to be grown and developed. And then it comes down to recognition that as some of these seeds of new ideas begin to flourish and bloom, you pick those things up and talk about them internally, and ideally externally. We try to do a lot of work on this where we both really celebrate work even if it's exploratory internally, but we also more and more are trying to push our work in progress and invite people into Shopify behind the scenes by often times sharing internal documents onto our social profiles and give people a glimpse of what work at Shopify looks like. And then ultimately it also just comes down to what team you have. A lot of the things that we give other explanations to — we say it's the process or the rituals or the feedback or the brief — almost always just comes down to no, it's just actually the people. You need to bring together a team of designers that are strategic thinkers, that are curious by nature, that are ready to embrace all of these new tools and that want to put them to use to explore the edges of what's possible. In some cases, people that were great performers that did amazing in the previous sort of chapter of work, in the previous expectations of what was required, no longer keep up — they don't want to go on this next journey together with us. And I think it's important for all companies to be really aware of this: you need to create an org that is really focused on performance, that is capable of creating beautiful experiences, that is capable of keeping up with ever-evolving expectations in the market, and that is ready for change. If you don't have that, then you need to change the composition, or you can't expect the work to come out great on the other side.

那么我们来谈谈变化这部分，因为距离 Toby 的 AI 备忘录爆火才过去大概几个月。所以，你看到 Shopify 的设计师有哪些行为或反应是你希望在未来继续推动设计进入下一个时代时更多看到的？

Let's talk a little bit about the change piece then, because it's only been a few months roughly since Toby's AI memo went pretty viral. So, what have been some of the behaviors or responses that you've seen from designers at Shopify that you'd like to see more of as you continue to push into this next era of design at Shopify?

Shopify 作为一个组织围绕 AI 转型，这真是太酷了。我认为我们在用户端做得最好的一些工作，就是我们的 AI 产品与 Shopify 核心平台的深度集成。但更引人注目的是，我们如何在内部使用 AI 工具彻底改变工作流程，并构建这些前沿体验。我们最近发布了一个例子：我们连接了所有客户互动的来源——从销售电话到他们对 Shopify 平台的内部使用，再到他们与支持系统的任何互动。每个客户互动都记录在某个数据库中，但这些都存在于不同的系统中。我们内部构建了一个叫 Scout 的工具，它基本上与所有这些不同的服务通信，让你在这种类似聊天的界面中进行客户研究。你可以说“嘿，我想了解更多关于商家在物流方面面临的问题”，它会从庞大的数据集中提取真实的商家对话，让你向这个 AI 询问具体哪些类型的商家有什么痛点，并得出解决方案。所以从客户研究到开发过程，再到构建，这给了我们所有人超能力，让我们能够跳过一些步骤，从而花更多时间真正打磨体验。

It's crazy how cool it is how Shopify has turned itself as an organization around AI. I think we are doing some of the best work actually on the user side in terms of how deeply integrated our AI products are with the Shopify core platform. But what's remarkable is how we have used AI tooling internally to completely change our workflows and allow us to build these cutting-edge experiences. We had one example we published very recently where we connected all of the sources we have for customer interactions — everything from sales calls to their internal usage of the Shopify platform to any interactions they've had with our support systems. Every customer interaction is recorded in some database somewhere, but these are all living in separate systems. We built this tool internally called Scout that basically communicates with all of these different services and allows you to do customer research in this sort of chat-like interface where you can be like 'hey, I want to learn more about what kind of issues merchants are facing around shipping' and it will pull from this enormous data set, real conversations with real merchants, to allow you to interrogate this AI about exactly what the pain points are for which types of merchants and come up with solutions. So you have things from customer research through the development process all the way into build that just gives all of us superpowers in how we can approach work and allows us to skip steps such that we can spend more time really honing the experience.

我喜欢这一点，因为你不需要依赖别人、流程或每周日程中的检查点——作为设计师，你几乎可以自己搞定。所以我很高兴听到不同组织这样运作，因为感觉是的，你可以走多远取决于你自己的能动性，只管去做，开辟自己的道路。我们看到这种工作流程的分化，这在 5 年前并不存在。绝大多数市场都在 Figma 中以大致相同的方式工作，现在突然有这么多不同的方式到达这么多不同类型的产物，看着真是令人着迷。

I love that because you don't have to be dependent on others or processes or this checkpoint in a weekly schedule or anything — you can kind of just make it happen as a designer. And so I'm so excited to hear different orgs operating this way because it feels like yeah, you can go as far as your own agency allows you to go, just make it happen. Just blaze your own trail. And we're seeing this divergence in workflows that didn't really exist 5 years ago. The vast majority of the market was doing things mostly the same way in Figma, and now all of a sudden there are so many different ways to arrive at so many different types of artifacts that it's kind of just fascinating to watch.

我完全同意。我认为有一件非常酷的事情是，我们实际上已经如此拥抱这一点，以至于 DevOp（我们的开发者入职计划）现在也是设计师入职的一部分。每个通过入职的设计师现在都完全进入开发环境，并且期望他们在完成 DevOp 入职时，已经向生产环境提交了两个拉取请求。这里的目标不是让设计师在 Shopify 内部“氛围编码”产品体验。我不认为今天那种代码的质量能达到我们的期望。但你应该能够做一些美学上的修改，并解决我们在日常使用的产品中都会遇到的那些小毛病、小烦恼。

I totally agree. One thing that's really cool, I think, is that we have actually embraced this to such an extent that DevOp, which is our kind of developer onboarding program, is now also part of designer onboarding. Every designer that comes through onboarding now fully onboards to a development environment, and it's expected that each of them will have made two pull requests into production by the time that they're done with this DevOp onboarding. The goal here isn't that designers are going to vibe code product experiences inside of Shopify. I don't think today that the quality of that code will be on par with what we expect it to be. But you should be able to make some aesthetic changes and be able to solve the sort of nitpicks, the pet peeves that we all experience in the products that we use day-to-day.

那些工程团队永远不会去碰的事情，因为改动太小，甚至组织一个工程团队去处理它都觉得负担太重。现在我们创造了一种更灵活的方式，可以自助完成这些小修复。但这也让我们能够构建非常丰富的端到端原型，使用真实的生产数据，使用真实的 Shopify，把我们的后台改造成不同的形态，在里面创建新产品，可以触摸、把玩。当然，设计保真度不如你在 Figma 里手绘体验那么高，但在动态性和连接性上要丰富得多。它以一种非常有趣的方式颠覆了工作流程：以前你从 Figma 开始，然后转到代码，在代码里打磨最后几个没画出来的交互。现在反过来了：你先构建一个 70-80% 的 vibe coding 原型，设计保真度不是 10 分满分，但它提供了完整的端到端故事，交互模式都在那里。一旦你调好了，这要快得多，然后你可以把它带到 Figma 或任何设计工具中，真正打磨细节、优化像素。我觉得这很迷人，我们使用工具的顺序在某种程度上翻转了。

The things that an engineering team will never get to because it's such a small change, and even getting an ENG team organized around trying to address it feels like too much of a burden. And now we just create this much nimbler way where we can self-serve these small fixes. But then it also allows us to build these really rich end-to-end prototypes using real production data, using actual Shopify, bringing our admin into a different shape, creating a new product inside of it that we can touch and hold and play around with. And sure, the design fidelity is not quite what it would be if you hand-drew the experience inside of Figma, but it's much richer in how dynamic it is and how connected it is. And it kind of turns the workflows upside down in this really interesting way where before you would start inside of Figma and then move it into code, and in the code you would try to finesse the last few interactions that you hadn't really sketched out. And now it's kind of the other way around: you'll build like a 70-80% vibe-coded prototype, and it's not a 10 out of 10 design fidelity, but it gives you a full end-to-end story and the interaction patterns are all there. And once you've dialed that in, which is much faster, you can bring it out into Figma, whichever design tool you use, to really hone in the details and polish the pixels. I find this fascinating that the order in which we use the tools sort of flipped in a way.

我想深入探讨一下，因为我看到一种几乎源于挫败感的情绪：设计师们感到有压力去采用这些工具，却因无法弥合保真度差距而非常沮丧。他们觉得，我花了好几个小时去修复那些有点偏差的地方，却不清楚这种格式本身有什么价值。他们可能会想，我在 Figma 里很快，为什么还需要这个？那么在 Shopify 内部，当思考如何呈现想法、如何获得批准时，这种更具交互性的格式扮演了什么角色？为什么它对内部的新设计流程有价值？

I want to double click on that and go a little bit deeper because there is this sentiment that I've seen that's almost birthed out of frustration where you have designers who are feeling some pressure to adopt these tools and they get really frustrated with the inability to close that fidelity gap and they feel like, you know, I'm spending hours trying to just fix everything that is a little bit off and it's unclear why the format itself has value. And they might be thinking, I'm fast in Figma, why do I even need this? So what is the role that this more interactive format plays internally in Shopify when thinking about how ideas are presented, how things get greenlit? Why is this valuable to the new design process internally?

我认为每次你离真实更近一点，事情就会变得更好。抽象层消失了。我们用作占位的假照片、Lorem Ipsum 都消失了。事情更接近现实。它实际上更公平地代表了体验会是什么样子，无论是好的部分还是混乱的中间地带——那些不完全如我们所愿的东西，但这就是处理真实客户、真实商家和真实工作流的现实。所以我通常主张在流程的每一步尽可能移除抽象层。事实上，我给团队定了一条规矩：永远不允许带演示文稿来参加我的任何会议。我们不会做预读，我也不要任何开场白。当我们看作品时，我们要在构建它的工具里看。所以如果我们要看设计，我们就打开 Figma，在 Figma 里过设计。如果是原型，我们就看原型。如果我们要看数据来讨论实际表现，我们就进入 Looker Studio，我们的 BI 工具，实际看那里的仪表盘。因为我认为，每当人们被允许使用讲故事或其他面纱来引导我们体验产品时，我们得到的体验是任何真实客户都不会有的。没有真实客户会有完美的条件——提前拿到预读、完全理解意图等等。他们面对的是混乱的现实：被扔进一个界面，需要自己摸索和处理。所以我认为让我们更接近那个现实总是好的、有帮助的。虽然这套工具让我们更接近现实，但我也完全确定，我们在 Shopify 的工作方式——我认为我们处于前沿——也绝对是错的。我确信五年后，我们会回顾这个时期，心想，哈哈，为什么人们会那样做？所以我只知道，以前的做法不是未来的做法，现在的做法也不是未来的做法。我只是在等待那个时刻，模型的能力让工具开始融合。我觉得很奇怪，我必须在设计旅程开始时决定是手绘还是 vibe coding，而这会把我引向两条完全不同的路径，完全不同。也许有一些桥梁，比如 Figma MCP 之类的东西，但它还不太行，没有达到预期效果。最终工具需要融合，你需要能够在不同模式之间更流畅地切换。我认为这就是我们要努力的方向，我不确定谁会以什么方式解决这个问题，但对我来说很清楚，那就是我们追求的未来。

I think every time that you get a little closer to what's real, things get better. Abstraction layers disappear. The fake photo we use for a placeholder, the Lorem Ipsum goes away. Things are closer to reality. It actually becomes a more fair representation of what the experience is going to be, for the good parts and also for the messy middle, the things that aren't quite exactly how we want them to be, but it's just the reality of dealing with real customers and real merchants and real workflows. So I'm just generally for removing abstraction layers in every step of the process whenever you can do it. In fact, I have a rule that I've established with my teams that you're never allowed to bring a presentation into any meeting with me. We're never going to do a pre-read, and I don't want any preambles. When we look at the work, we're going to look at the work in the tool in which it was built. So if we're going to look at the designs, we're going to open up the Figma, we're going to work through the designs inside of the Figma. If it's inside of a prototype, we can look at the prototype. If we're going to look at numbers to discuss how it's actually performing, we're going to go into Looker Studio, our BI tool, and actually look at the dashboards there. Because I think that whenever people are allowed to use storytelling or other kinds of veils to steer how we experience a product, we come away with an experience that no real customer is ever going to have. No real customer is ever going to have the perfect circumstance where they got the pre-read right before and they fully understood the intent and all of the things. They get the messy reality of just being thrown into an interface and needing to figure it out and deal with it. So I think just getting us closer to that is always good and helpful. While this set of tools allows us to get closer to that, I'm also entirely sure that the way we are working inside of Shopify, and I think that we are sort of at the cutting edge, is also absolutely wrong. I know for a fact that 5 years from now, we're going to look back at this time and be like, lol, why did people do that? So all I know is that the previous way we did things isn't how we're going to be doing things. What we're doing now isn't how we're going to be doing things. And I'm just waiting for this point in time when the capabilities of the models allow the tools to begin to converge. I find it sort of weird how I have to decide at the start of a design journey if I'm going to do freehand or if I'm going to vibe code, and it will take me down two completely separate paths, completely different. And maybe there's some bridges, like a Figma MCP or something like this, but it's not quite working right, it's not doing what it's supposed to. Eventually the tools need to merge, and you need to be able to shift between modalities in a much more fluid way. I think that's what we're going to be tracking to, and I'm not sure who's going to solve it in what way, but that seems clear to me that that's the future that we're gunning for.

那我就把你的时间框架理论抛回给你。当你放大视野，思考 Shopify 设计实践在 1 到 2 年时间框架之外的北极星是什么时，你想象或希望看到哪些事情？

Let me throw your time frame theory back at you then. So when you zoom out and think about the northstar for what the practice of design at Shopify could look like beyond the 1 to 2 year time frame, what are some of the things that you imagine or hope for?

公司环境中的界限将完全模糊。我一直在想一件事：AI 对每个人最大的作用就是让你在每个工作上都能达到 7 分（满分 10 分）。我不是律师，但如果你真需要，我现在大概可以当你的律师。我不是工程师，但我正在写代码，编写我能实际使用的体验，对吧？所以我是个 7 分工程师，7 分律师。这也意味着 Shopify 的每个员工都是 7 分设计师。在这个 7 分世界里，所有这些界限开始模糊，这意味着你会以完全不同的方式组建团队，以完全不同的方式围绕问题组织起来。我相信 Shopify 内部有很多团队不需要设计师，因为也许那个体验不是大多数用户的热门路径。也许只是为某个设置界面带来一些更好的交互模式，作为你正在做的某个发货设置的一部分。

Company environments will have completely blurred lines. I have this thing that I keep coming back to: that what AI mostly does for everyone is that it makes you a seven out of 10 at every job. I'm not a lawyer, but if you really need one, I can probably be yours at this point. I'm not an engineer, but I'm writing code and coding experiences that I can actually use, right? So I'm a seven out of 10 engineer. I'm a seven out of 10 lawyer. It also means that everyone that works at Shopify are seven out of 10 designers. And in this sort of seven out of 10 world, you will have all of these lines begin to blur, and it will mean that you will start to compose teams in completely different ways and organize yourselves around problems in completely different ways. I believe that there are many teams inside of Shopify that aren't going to need a designer because perhaps the experience isn't part of the hot path for most of our users. Perhaps it's about bringing a little bit of better interaction patterns to some settings screen as part of some shipping setup that you're doing.

我完全接受未来产品经理或工程师通过设计思维来打造体验，做出一个 7 分的客户产品。这对设计师意味着：第一，如果你是一个 7 分设计师，你可能就有麻烦了，对吧？如果你只有 7 分，你并没有真正提升你的手艺水准。那么你应该要么努力向上突破，要么利用界限模糊的机会，开始做超出你本职范围的事情，把产品思维、工程、数据和设计整合起来，把自己定位成一个能串联各节点的人。对于我们现有的设计师，我认为我们需要在技术栈上下延伸。我的意思是，我们要加倍投入设计系统。如果我们依赖 AI 来完成更多的设计输出，那么对输入的要求就从未如此之高。在 Shopify，我们的设计系统叫 Polaris。我希望它成为我们最重要的项目之一，是我们任何时候投入最多时间和精力的东西，因为 Polaris 能让产品负责人或工程负责人产出的设计从 7 分提升到 8 分甚至 9 分，因为构建它的组件非常出色。这就是向下延伸的意义。另一件我认为设计师应该做的事是向上延伸，专注于那些关键路径——定义产品、留下印象、让人记住的体验。我们要允许自己在那些地方跳出框框，真正把它们做精，让它们不仅仅是完成功能的工具然后消失，而是精心打磨到让你想反复回来使用的东西。因为我的假设是，在遥远的未来，软件将是免费的，对吧？我们已经能隐约触摸到这样一个世界：如果我想创建一个待办事项应用，我可以进去用 vibe coding 在 5 分钟内搞定，得到一个为我定制的待办事项应用，然后我可以让它专门为我服务，比如周三的待办事项看起来和周四的不同，或者任何我的需求。所以你将生活在一个有无限生成软件的世界。这对软件提供商意味着什么？意味着你的软件需要差异化，需要建立与用户的关系，用得越多就越好。你需要创造人们愿意回来使用的软件，而不是试图自己复制一个。我认为做到这一点的方法就是像我描述的那样向上延伸，把体验从任何人都能达到的基线提升到让你看到时惊叹‘哇’的程度。

I'm completely content with like a PM or an engineer vibe designing their way into that experience in this future and kind of creating a 7 out of 10 customer product. What that means then for designers is that one, if you're a seven out of 10 designer, you might be in trouble, right? Like if you're a seven out of 10, you're not really raising the bar of your craft. So then you should probably either really try to think how do I push myself upwards or how can I use the fact that the lines are blurring for me as well to start to do things that span beyond the thing you're hired to do and start to bring together product thinking and engineering and data and design to position yourself as someone that can pull the nodes together. For the designers that we have on staff, I think that what we need to do is to go up and down in the stack. And what I mean by that is that I want us to double down on design systems. If we are going to rely on AI to do much more of the design outputs, then the demand on the inputs have never been higher. And so at Shopify, we have our design system that's called Polaris. I want that to become like one of the most important things that we work on, one of the things that we spend the most time on the most effort on at any given time, because Polaris is the thing that's going to make the design that a design of a product leader or an engineering leader produces go from being seven out of 10 to being 8 out of 10 or 9 out of 10 because the components that built that up were phenomenal. And that's the point of going down in the stack. The other thing that I think we should do as designers is to go up in the stack and it's to focus on the hot paths, the experiences that define a product that leaves an impression, a mark, the thing that you remember, and give ourselves permission to really draw outside of the lines for those to really juice them up and make them feel not just like utilities that are there to do the thing that they did but then kind of disappear, but things that are really dialed in in such a way that it's something that you want to come back to over and over again. Because the assumption I have is that in this future that's far out into the future that we're imagining right now, software is going to be free, right? We can already kind of touch this world where if I want to create a to-do app, I can go in and I can vibe code a to-do app in like 5 minutes and I have now a custom-built to-do app and I can start to make that be purpose-built for me such that the to-dos for Wednesdays look different than the to-dos I have on Thursdays or whatever my need is. So, you're going to live in this world where you have infinite generated software. What does that mean for a software provider? Well, it means that your software needs to differentiate and be software that builds a relationship to its users such that the more you use it, the better it becomes. You need to create software that people want to come back to instead of trying to reproduce on their own. And I think you do this by going up in the stack in the way that I described and pushing the experiences from the baseline that anyone will be able to get to something that when you see it, you're like, 'Wow.'

我喜欢这句话——创造人们愿意不断回来使用、而不是自己复制的东西。这长期来看就是 SaaS 的新衡量标准。因为我已经在某些工具上有这种感觉：天哪，我完全可以自己做这个。只要再多一点时间，我就能自己做出来，而且只为我定制。所以，这就是设计的差异化所在，对吧？当你觉得‘哦，我完全没兴趣去改进它了，这就是 10 分的体验’。我想这大概就是设计师如此有价值的原因。

I love that line, creating something that people want to keep coming back to rather than reproduce on their own. That's like the new measuring stick for SaaS in the long run. Because I already feel that with certain tools where I'm like, man, I could just make this. Like, if I just had a little bit more time, I could just make this and I would make it just for me. And so, that is where design is the differentiator, right? Where you're just like, oh, I have no interest in trying to better this. This is the 10 out of 10 experience. I think that's probably why designers are so valuable.

你知道吗，让我震惊的是，我现在看软件，从来没见过那种体验。这太疯狂了，当我想到我使用的所有工具，我很难给你举出一个今天有 10 分体验的产品。因为我认为我们这个行业被教导了太久：快速行动、打破常规、精益、做 MVP、想办法把切片做得更窄更小。这曾经对我们很有用，因为创造东西本身就带来了优势，让你领先。但当这一切消失时会发生什么？仅仅做出东西不再是战略优势了。

And you know what's shocking to me, man, is that I look at software right now and I never see that. It's incredibly crazy for me that when I consider all of the tools that I use, I'm hard-pressed to give you an example of a product that has a 10 out of 10 experience today. Because I think we as an industry have been taught for so long to move fast and break things, to be lean, to do an MVP, to really figure out how you make the slice be more narrow and smaller. And it served us well because by creating something you already are kind of creating an advantage and you're moving ahead. But what happens when that disappears? It's no longer strategic advantage to just have built something.

是的。

Yeah.

当战略优势变成建造持久的东西、留下印象的东西时，会发生什么？我认为现在有一个巨大的机会，或者说几乎是一个要求，让公司真正审视自己的体验，问：‘嘿，有什么能阻止任何人用一个周末 vibe coding 出这个？我们的产品凭什么比任何人靠六罐红牛和一天假做出来的东西更好？’当然还有网络效应、深度集成的工作流等其他因素。但在体验层面，是什么让优质软件区别于无限生成的软件？是设计，是体验。这也引出了我目前关于市场的另一个论点：设计仍然被严重低估。我们能看到外面很有趣的场景——AI 人才争夺战，那些 AI 研究员的薪酬远超 NBA 合同，对吧？这主要发生在西海岸旧金山的 AI 实验室，那里是炒作周期展开的地方。但我们大多数人，世界上大多数公司，实际上都在相同的模型上构建，我们都能访问相同的基础模型，我们在相同的基础上构建不同的体验。对我们来说，差异化的东西不会是 AI 研究员，因为我们已经把那个外包了。差异化将是我们把基础模型转化成的体验，以及我们如何将其诠释成独特、有差异化的界面，而这正是设计师的工作。所以我的观点是，仅次于 AI 研究员，在这个市场正在发生的转型中，最重要的手艺就是设计。设计师将把公司与那些我们周末自己随便做出来的软件区分开来，变成我们愿意付费的东西。我坚信视频的力量可以解释我作为设计师的想法。

What happens when the strategic advantage is to have built something that lasts, something that leaves an impression? I think that there's this huge opportunity right now or almost a requirement right now for companies to really start to look at their experiences and be like, 'Hey, what's stopping anyone from just vibe coding this over a weekend? What about our product is going to be better than the thing that anyone can produce over six Red Bulls and a day off?' And of course there are other things like network effects and having deeply integrated workflows and stuff like this. But at the experience layer, what is the thing that sets a premium software apart from infinitely generated software? And it's design. It's the experience. And this also leads me down to this other thesis I have right now about the market, which is that design is still so enormously undervalued. We have this, it's sort of fun to look at from the outside like bring out the popcorn the AI wars for talent and you have these AI researchers that are being paid well past NBA contracts, NBA players right? And it's very much happening on the sort of AI labs west coast San Francisco based, that's where this hype cycle is unfolding. But most of us, most of the companies in the world, we're actually building on the same models, we have access to the same foundation models, and we're building different experiences on the same foundation. For us, the thing that differentiates won't be the AI researcher because we've kind of outsourced that. It's going to be the experience we turn that foundation model into and how we interpret that into an interface that is differentiated, that is unique, and that's the job of designers. And so my take is that second to AI researchers, the most important craft in this transformation that's happening in the marketplace is design. And designers are the ones that are going to set companies apart from the software that we just go out and we build for ourselves over a weekend to the things that we decide to pay for. I'm a big believer in the power of video to explain my thinking as a designer.

所以当需要收集反馈时，我会在 Slack 里丢一个 Loom 链接，再丢一个 Figma 原型链接，然后反馈散得到处都是，简直一团糟。所以我正在打造我一直希望存在的产品，它叫 Inflight。你可以把它想象成异步评审。这是一种分享视频演示和交互原型或你正在设计的任何内容的简单方式。然后 AI 会采访你团队里的人，获取你需要的反馈，并为你整理到一个漂亮的分析页面中。目前我只向 Dive Club 的听众开放访问权限。所以如果你想成为首批使用 Inflight 的人，请访问 dive.com/club/inflight 来抢占名额。

So when it's time to get feedback, I'll drop a Loom link in Slack and another link to a Figma prototype and then feedback will be scattered everywhere and I mean it's a mess. So I'm building the product that I've always wanted to exist and it's called Inflight. You can kind of think of it like an async crit. It's an easy way to share a video walkthrough along with an interactive prototype or whatever you're designing. And then AI interviews the people on your team to get you the feedback that you need and organizes everything for you in a beautiful insights page. So right now I'm only giving access to dive club listeners. So if you want to be one of the first to use Inflight, head to dive.com/club/inflight to claim your spot.

你在招聘这些重要人才时，会看重哪些品质，让你相信他们能让 Shopify 在设计上脱颖而出？

What are some of the qualities that you would look for in these big time hires that you believe would allow Shopify to differentiate with design?

所以，我现在对组织要做的事情就是尽可能多地移除管理层级，取而代之的是那些真正被赋能的工匠，他们不仅掌握表面功夫，还能考虑整个客户旅程。他们模糊了界限，输出和打磨都很出色，但他们也在进行战略思考，像我们期望产品经理那样推理产品体验。他们充满好奇心。他们拥抱新工具和新工作流，尝试新事物，而且非常有创造力。我相信没有人再确切知道正确的解决方案是什么了。所以，我们只需要更快地尝试。在短时间内尝试很多事情比以往任何时候都更便宜。我们需要的是那些不对任何单一事物过于执着，而是真正热爱问题本身的人。

So, what I'm trying to do with the org right now is to just remove as many layers of management as I can and instead have these really empowered crafters that don't just hold surfaces, but that can consider entire customer journeys. They're blurring the lines that the output, the polish is wonderful, but they're thinking strategically and are reasoning about the product experience much like we would expect a PM to do. They're curious. They're embracing new tools and new workflows, trying new things, and they're very generative. I believe that no one quite knows exactly what the right solution is anymore. And so, we just need to try quicker. And it's cheaper than ever to try many things in a short period of time. It's people that don't get too attached to any one thing, but that really fall in love with the problem more than anything else.

在作品集或作品集展示过程中，你可能会看到哪些信号，比如在入职前的任何环节？哪些信号是重要的，设计师可以据此思考：如果他们受到启发并想加入这个愿景，如何才能有机会在这样的公司获得职位？

What are some of the signals that you might see in either a portfolio or how someone carries or talks about their work in a portfolio presentation process like anywhere in this pre-joining journey? What are the signals that matter that a designer could then use to think about how do I even get a chance to land a role at a company like this if they're inspired and want to join the vision?

对我来说非常重要的一点是，当我们谈论这些事情时，我强调新事物，比如推理策略的能力、超越表面、思考客户旅程。但归根结底，如果手艺不好，那就不行。这几乎是第一件事：我希望人们能产出美丽的东西，从完全主观的角度来看是赏心悦目的。比如我的观点，我觉得这看起来漂亮，因为归根结底，我不希望 Shopify 拥有最创新的流程或使用最前沿的工具，但产出的作品看起来却不漂亮。它看起来不像一个你引以为豪的体验。所以我首先看的是，这个人是不是一个优秀的设计师，能产出我认为有感染力、有趣味的漂亮作品。这就是作品集评审的过程，你看例子等等。然后我认为另一部分可以通过对话来了解，因为即使他们以前的工作环境中没有真正运用过那种思维方式或工作方式，如果他们是一个真正好奇的人，对未来有想法，愿意推理问题或辩论问题而不固执己见，那么我知道我们可以合作，即使他们过去没有机会实践。实际上，在招聘过程中，我们仍然非常关注传统的设计手艺，然后更多的是性格方面：嘿，我们觉得他们有没有足够的原始动力和我们一起开启下一章？

One thing that's really important for me is that when we talk about these things, I emphasize the new things like ability to reason about the strategy, to go beyond the surface, to think about a customer journey. But at the end of the day, if the craft isn't good, it's not going to work. Like that is sort of the first thing like I want people that can produce beautiful things, aesthetically pleasing things measured by a completely subjective point of view. Like my point of view like I think this looks pretty because at the end of the day I'm not looking for Shopify to have like the most innovative process being at the cutting edge of which tools we employ but produce work that when you look at it it's just not pretty. It doesn't look like an experience that you're proud of. So the first thing I look for is just like hey is this someone who's a great designer who can produce beautiful work that I think is emotive and interesting and that's the sort of you know you go through a portfolio review and you look at the examples and all of this stuff and then I think that the other part you kind of can sus out through just conversation because even if they haven't really been able to employ that way of thinking or that way of working in a previous work environment, if they're a genuinely curious person who has thoughts about where the future is going, who is willing to reason about a problem or debate a problem without getting fixed in a position, then I know that we can work with that even if it's not something that they have had the chance to exercise in the past. Really in the hiring process, we're still very focused on the traditional craft of design and then it's more of a personality thing of like, hey, do we think they have the raw horsepower to embark on this next chapter together with us?

我喜欢“原始动力”这个说法。我现在要戴上设计推特怀疑论者的帽子，对你说的一个观点提出质疑，我很好奇你的回应。就是关于手艺和视觉这块，因为我认为这现在是一个两极分化的话题。你说的话我经常听到，但我也收到不少人的评论，说“搞什么鬼”。我具体想反驳的是：你也在谈论设计系统的重要性，以及用这些漂亮的组件武装人们，大多数设计师只是伸手去拿预先组装好的乐高盒子，进行更战略性的思考，他们不必考虑像素级的问题。然而我们却听到这种趋势：视觉基础几乎是领导者首先看重的。问题基本上是：为什么这很重要？为什么我必须花时间在这上面，而我觉得为了吸引那些顶级公司，我必须同时投资所有其他领域？

I love horsepower. I'm going to put on my design Twitter skeptic hat here for a second and I'm going to push back on one thing that you said and I'm curious what your response is and it's this craft and visual piece because I think it is a polarizing topic right now because what you're saying I hear a lot of and yet I get quite a few comments from people being like what the heck you know and the specific push back that I want to use is well you know you're also talking about the importance of design systems and equipping people with these beautiful components and most designers are just reaching for the box of Legos that have been preassembled for them and thinking more strategically and they don't have to think about pixel level problems. And yet we're hearing this trend where visual fundamentals are almost the first thing that leaders are looking for. And the question is basically why why does that matter? Why is that something that I have to dedicate time to when I feel like I have to invest in all other areas simultaneously to be attractive to some of these top tier companies?

我希望设计师投入大量时间打磨设计系统和组件。但这实际上是为了让非设计师能够以更快的速度输出达到基准的体验。当然，我们也会使用所有这些相同的组件，但接下来就到了堆栈中上升的点：当你被聘用来领导设计或成为一名设计师时，我允许你跳出框框，重新利用我们一起构建的那些系统，创造出仅仅通过组装乐高积木无法获得的体验。乐高积木给了你站立的基础，但你可以退后一步说：“好吧，实际上，即使我错过了这块乐高或那块乐高，我也可以拿起我的铅笔和手术刀，开始重塑这些积木，打造真正量身定制的体验。”这就是你获得的许可。这成为了作为设计师进行设计和作为其他人使用设计之间的区别。然后，我想对哪些客户旅程重要持有非常强烈的观点。我把这些称为“热路径”，但对我来说，热路径只是另一种说法，指的是那些留下印象、留下印记、定义体验的旅程。你知道，当我们有一个产品时，我们通常知道一组最常见的工作流，它们定义了大多数用户大部分时间的日常工作。

I want designers to focus an extreme amount of time honing the design systems and components. But really the job of that is to enable people that are not designers to be able to output experiences that meet a baseline at a much more rapid rate. Now, of course, we are also going to use all of those same components, but then comes the point of moving up in a stack where when you're hired to lead design or to be a designer, I'm giving you permission to also draw outside of the lines and rake some of those same systems that we help build together to create experiences that you can't quite get to by just assembling Lego blocks. But where the Lego blocks kind of give you the foundation to stand on, but then you can start to take a step back and say, 'Well, actually, even though I missed this Lego piece or this Lego piece, I'm allowed to pick up my pencil and my scalpel and start to reshape these building blocks to be really purpose-built experiences.' And that's the permission you get. That becomes the difference between designing as a designer and putting design to use as someone else. And then I want to be really really opinionated about which customer journeys matter. And I talk about these as hot paths, but for me the hot paths is really just a different way of saying the journeys that leave an impression, that make a mark, that define an experience. You know, we usually when we have a product, we know a set of workflows that are the most common workflows that kind of define the day-to-day for most of the users most of the time.

我希望那些核心体验是卓越的，我不介意在其他事情上少花时间，因为我更倾向于一种体验：某些事情做起来很容易，但仅此而已。就好像我们让它可用，却没有让它变得惊艳。只要那些你反复使用的功能被打磨到一定程度，当你拿起它时，你就知道这是高质量的软件，这是顶级的软件。而我发现，我们常常陷入另一种情况：把精力像抹花生酱一样均匀地铺在所有事情上。

I want those to be outstanding and I'm okay with us not spending the same amount of time on some of the other things because I much prefer an experience where certain things are just easy to do but not much else. It's like we made it possible, we didn't make it incredible. As long as some of the things that you keep coming back to have been perfected to a point that when you hold it, you know that it's quality software, you know that it's premium software. And I find that too often we end up doing the other thing where we just peanut butter our efforts across the whole thing.

我认为这是我们组织方式的结果，因为作为公司，我们一直认为上下文非常重要，人们应该被招聘到一个角色中，以便他们能够深入钻研。但这样做的结果只是：你在一个本可以一两天就上手的表面上钻得很深，却浪费了一年的职业生涯，只是试图让那个表面变得稍微好一点。

I think it's a result of how we're organized because as companies we have had this idea that context is really important and that people should kind of be hired to a role such that they can go really deep. But the only thing that happens with that is that you have gone really deep on a surface that you could have literally onboarded onto in like a day or a day and a half and instead you wasted a year of your career just trying to make that surface incrementally better.

这是我持有的一个颇具争议的观点，但我基本上认为上下文在很大程度上被高估了。人们，尤其是设计师，实际上可以非常非常快地接手新问题。你知道，你加入一个新团队、新环境、新场景，和几个用户聊一聊，看看产品的一些历史及其演变。和你的同事、产品负责人或工程伙伴聊一聊，你就可以开始工作了。你带来的将是新鲜的视角、新的见解。你会带来好奇心和天真，以至于不完全理解所有先验知识，从而被允许跳出框框思考。

This is like one of those controversial truths that I hold, but I basically think context is largely overrated. People, and specifically designers, can actually onboard to new problems really, really fast. You know, you come into a new team, a new environment, a new setting, you talk to a couple of users, you look at some of the history of the product and its evolution. You talk to your peers, your product leader or engineering partner, you're ready to roll. The thing that you're going to bring is fresh perspective, new insights. You're going to bring curiosity and naivety to the point of not actually understanding all of the priors and being allowed to think outside of the box.

这就是让代理公司如此特别的原因。我想这也是你希望 Molly 的 DNA 能产生影响的一部分原因吧，因为我看到一些在代理公司工作了 6 年的设计师，我会想，天哪，你在截然不同的行业和领域之间快速切换的能力令人印象深刻。我喜欢代理公司的模式。我的职业生涯就是从代理公司做设计开始的，那种快速切换上下文、快速上手、拥抱新设计或新思维方式的能力，以及超级生成式的能力，因为你必须在很短的时间内拿出 10 个不同的方案。

That's what makes agencies so special. I would imagine that's part of your hope for the Molly DNA rubbing off because I look at some of the designers who have spent 6 years in an agency and I'm like, man, your ability to spin up on radically different industries and surface areas is very impressive. I love the agency model. I started my career designing in agencies and the ability to very quickly context switch, to ramp up, to embrace a new design or a new way of thinking about the problem, being super generative because you have to be able to produce like 10 different pitches in a very short period of time.

这真是一项非常有价值的技能。所以我实际上认为我们正在进入这样一个环境或市场：那些有良好代理公司经历的人会非常抢手，因为他们拥有超级生成式的方法论。也许比那些在知名公司工作了 5 年但只局限于非常小或狭窄问题的人更受欢迎，这有点像颠覆了市场以往的价值取向。

It's such a valuable skill. And so I actually think we're entering this environment or market where people that have had good agency runs are going to be really sought after because of the experience they've had of being super generative in their approach. Perhaps more sought after, which is sort of like flipping what's been valued in the market, than someone that's worked at a fan company for 5 years but has been limited to a very small or narrow problem.

好了，Carl，感谢你来做客，抽出时间分享你在 Shopify 的愿景以及推动事情发展的各种方式。在这次对话之后，我非常欣赏的一点是，像这样规模的公司很容易安于现状。你知道，作为市场领导者，让别人去摸索，我们只需适应已经奏效的东西。但你确实在推动设计这门学科向前发展。感谢你来做客，分享你所有的想法以及 Shopify 设计实践演变的多种方式。我很期待继续关注这段旅程。

Well, Carl, thank you for coming on and taking the time and sharing a little bit about your vision with Shopify, all of the ways that you're pushing things forward. I just have such an appreciation after this conversation of like there's got to be this temptation for a company that size to just be comfortable. You know, market leader, let other people figure it out. We'll just adapt to what we already see works. But you really are pushing design as a discipline forward. Thank you for coming on and just sharing everything that's on your mind and the different ways that this practice is evolving at Shopify. I'm excited to continue to follow along with the journey.

是的，非常感谢你邀请我，让我稍微畅谈了一番。这是一次非常有趣的对话，期待未来的一切。

Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me and letting me rant a little bit. This has been a super fun conversation and yeah, looking forward to everything that's ahead.

在你走之前，我想花一分钟给你介绍一下我最喜欢的产品，因为经常有人问我用什么工具。Framer 是我建网站的工具，Genway 是我做研究的方式，Granola 是我在评审时记笔记的工具，Jitter 是我给设计做动画的工具，Lovable 是我用代码实现创意的工具，Mobin 是我寻找设计灵感的工具，Paper 是我像创意人一样设计的工具，而 Raycast 是我每一步的快捷方式。这些公司都是我精心挑选的，这样我才能全职做这些节目。所以，支持这个节目的首要方式就是去看看它们。你可以在 dive.com/partners 找到完整列表。

Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full-time. So, by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at dive.com/partners.