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- [00:00]
Marvin Schweibold
Everything we build inside of our team triggers something else in somebody else's brain, and then they use what they're innately good at. Could be motion, could be coding, could be operation, could be product. To contribute to that mission or to contribute to that project, I feel like the agency model helps us create and maintain that team of almost misfits that all work together and solve the same problem, but from their specific lens.
- [00:23]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning. Remember when the chief design officer at Shopify, Carl Rivera, came on recently and he shared his vision to create the Shopify product design studio? Well, today's guest is Marvin Schweibold, who was part of Molly Studio, who Shopify recently acquired to bring that vision to life. So we're gonna do a deep dive into creativity, AI tools, and what it looks like to differentiate with design. And there's some secret, seriously cool work happening at Shopify right now. But before we get into it all, I asked Marvin to share a little bit about his journey leading up to Molly's studio.
- [01:07]
Marvin Schweibold
I started in graphic design very early on in my career. Kind of by accident, I stumbled across a design studio that I wanted to work with. Actually, my mom got me my first internship at that studio. I stayed with that studio for five years. That whole part of my, I guess, like, early career was very much routed around typography and branding and like analog design. We were, we were, we were printing a lot, we were embroiding papers, we were working a lot on stationary things for companies. We were making a lot of interior for restaurants. And that, that whole world, I think, to me was just something that I didn't know I could experience. Like, I will say I was pretty average in school. Like, not very good at math or, or writing and reading. And when I stumbled into graphics, then I felt like I'd found something that innately was easy for me to, to consume and to understand. And I, and I kind of felt like I had a superpower when I was using type and, and colors. I wanted to continue working with that agency. My parents were like, you have to study something. You can't just go from school straight to a job. That's not how this, that's not how we race you. And I went to the agency. I was like, I. I have to study. There's a design school right in our town here in Stuttgart. It's a, it's university. You can go there and study communication design, visual communication and typography, and you can continue working with Us. So it's like, okay, best of both worlds. I get to learn about graphic design, about how to visually communicate through shapes and colors, but I get to. I get to practice it, like, with real clients in real meetings and real scenarios.
- [02:35]
Rid
So what was it like then, making the jump from more of the like, agency, traditional graphic design background to working in tech? Because you, like, went right to Squarespace, right? It's the next role. Like, what were some of the mental shifts or growth areas that you had to tackle moving from those two worlds?
- [02:51]
Marvin Schweibold
There was one step in between that I'll quickly mention as well. I moved from, from, from Germany to Los Angeles and work with an agency there in the movie industry. But already, like, my first jump, going from branding and analog design into interactive design and web design. And that was, I think, a big part of what shaped me early on, especially in. In the web design industry. I could use the web to manipulate how the user would understand something, or I could delight through motion or through delays or through WebGL. And like, we worked on a lot of projects like Isle of Dogs and Ghost Store, Death of Style, and like all these fun movies, we worked a lot with a 24, you had to craft and create experiences. They felt more like art pieces than they did websites that would just, like, entice users and bring them along for the journey, like, get them hyped up about a, like, specific movie or specific film. That's how I ended up in. In tech, because I was on Squarespace's radar. They hired me for a web concepts department that they had, which was an internal team that lived between product and brand, right in the intersection of all of the good stuff, but was disconnected from the roadmap. My first job in tech was a very unconventional title or role. Like I was. I didn't start as a product designer or as an intern in tech or as a copywriter or as an engineer. I started in what could the future of the web for Squarespace look like? T team. And that whole team had freedom and range to mess around and prototype with the ecosystem that Squarespace had created to push the envelope further, which at times was scary because it sounds really fun when you don't have a roadmap until you have a roadmap, like, show up
- [04:31]
Rid
to reviews and to meetings.
- [04:32]
Marvin Schweibold
We're on the hook for, like, coming up with new paradigms, but the best paradigms and the best new ideas that came out of our team and out of our studio came out of the idea of prototyping and tinkering and, and just Kind of messing around with all of the components and bits and pieces we had at our disposal. And then very quickly fell in love with the complexity of just building software and building editors. At Watson, I would create one off websites. They rarely had a CMS or anything like that. And at Squarespace, I learned to think about an ecosystem in a system. I remember my first project working on headers, and I was so sure that I could tackle this and knock it out of the park. And I failed so miserably because I didn't understand how to think through all the configurations and complexities that make up a specific header.
- [05:20]
Rid
A few more constraints when you're working at that level.
- [05:22]
Marvin Schweibold
A few more constraints. Exactly. And like learning how to. Like how that all collapses and the hamburger versus the what's exposed in the menu. There's double menus. Like, there was so many things that I. That I didn't know that actually existed. And I guess instead of getting afraid or getting discouraged by any of that complexity, I actually got really into it. I was like, oh, solving this or making this more beautiful within the constraints of what our editor is will be a huge impact for our users. And the same was for templates. We built a lot of templates for customers, and seeing those out in the world and people using them was very addictive and very fun.
- [05:56]
Rid
Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. Never in a million years did I think my design workflow would change so drastically in the last few months. And a big part of it is Paper's new new Snapshot tool. It's a chrome extension that lets you copy any component or element from your live website and then paste it directly into Paper as editable layers. So all the time I'll grab something from Prod, have Claude immediately spin it up six different ways on Paper's canvas, and then when I'm ready to send a concept back to Claude, it's seamless because Paper's Canvas uses real HTML and css. That workflow feels a lot like the future of design to me. And you can start doing this today. Just head to Dive Cloud Slash Paper to try it out. If you're still designing in Figma and rebuilding in Framer, then you're doing twice the work with Framers design pages. You no longer have to jump between tools. In the last page that I made for the Dive website, I explored and built entirely in Framer, you can sketch, iterate, structure, and publish to the web all from the same place. Framer isn't just a site builder. It's a design tool for your entire workflow. And you can start creating today for free@framer.com and if you use the code RID, you can unlock a free month of Framer Pro. Now, on to the episode. So can we fast forward a little bit in the story then? For a lot of people, you kind of came on the map through Molly and the Shopify acquisition, and maybe they're like checking out your Twitter and everything. So, like, what's the story behind Molly? How'd that come to be? And what made the way that you all were, like, positioning yourselves unique too?
- [07:32]
Marvin Schweibold
I started working with this extremely talented designer called Jtel. We met years ago here in New York. He DM'd me, actually on what was then Twitter and just wanted to. To hang out. We grabbed a coffee and that coffee turned into like, I think, a four hour conversation about design and principles and engineering and how we thought about the world and about products. And basically at the end of that conversation, we decided to work together and we immediately started freelancing together. And we've worked together basically every day since that initial coffee meeting. And we created Molly because at the time we were both freelancing and working together, but we didn't have a studio. We didn't have a space to actually work out of and call home and collaborate in. And that's why we created the space. We wanted a place that we could sit across from each other on a daily basis and just bounce ideas off each other's heads. And I think there's that Steve Jobs quote about the rock tumbler. Like, you put a bunch of like, rough rocks into a rock tumbler and you let it work for 24 hours, and the next day you have these really beautiful pebbles. It's because they spent the last 24 hours bumping into each other. And it turns out that how we wanted to work and the team that we assembled around ourselves was actually more important than the projects we took on. And so a lot of the work we did and we started working with Shop and with Shop app, which is a huge part of obviously Shopify. That's what really, like, put us on Shopify's map, where they were like, oh, this team and this group of people and the community they've built around themselves, the culture that they have created and the environment that they have and how they solve problems is actually beautiful and we would love to see them have an impact on a bigger mission.
- [09:05]
Rid
I definitely want to dig into how the product design studio at Shopify works before we move on. I do Kind of want to get a sense of what creative collaboration looked like through the lens of Molly. So is there maybe like a behind the scenes of a project that you're particularly proud of that we could point at to understand how you all are working and what you guys are bringing to the table?
- [09:28]
Marvin Schweibold
I feel like one of the biggest projects at Molly, we collaborated with the studio Collins that everyone's familiar with, work with Brian Collins and Leland Meschmeyer on and a bunch of other like super talented people on their teams on a redesign of Collins. The way way they always tell the story now that the website is live is like, we came in to pitch for this project and we were like, everybody's thinking about the web in the wrong way and it's thinking about consumption of information on the web in the wrong way. And we have our own approach of how we apply content consumption to all of the projects we work on. And we will apply that not a template, but that mythology onto you. And they were extremely intrigued by that because they were. They hadn't heard that type of approach before. For us, it was this idea that the web worked no differently than the way you would use your phone or your computer. For us, it was more nos, basically. So consuming information on the web needed to be extremely simple and extremely efficient. And we tried to highlight the most important things that made your company or your business successful. And then anything else below that was progressively disclosed through patterns that you would find on your iPhone or on your iPad. And that was, I think, distinctively different approach to how we looked at websites and how we looked at content in general online, which was also important because we worked on a lot of products as well. That, to Collins, was. Was very interesting. And we spent well over a year working with them on this website and churned out hundreds and hundreds of different layouts and really like took them along for the journey of like understanding what is it that you're trying to sell on this website or explain on this website and highlight on this website and how can we present that in the best possible way. So that was like an amazing experience. Especially because like, four weeks before launching the website, Brian came in and changed everything. Start over again. Which is good because I think where we landed now is a lot better than where we were. Since we're a small team, we were able to always plug in very, very effectively with our clients. And like, we just hosted a lot of one on ones and a lot of interviews with them. And we really actually required and expected a lot of attention from the client to like really throw everything they had at us because we needed as much information as possible to come up with a. With, with a very sound strategy.
- [11:47]
Rid
Any insights or lessons that came through working with Brian Collins for a year.
- [11:51]
Marvin Schweibold
There's so many parts of him that make him so eccentric and, and so, and so talented. But we had these two sessions with him where we were reviewing the website and I think I come from a background of typography, but in those two sessions, they were each maybe like six hours long. I think I learned more about typography than in my entire university years because he's relentless at compression and relentless at reducing complexity. Like, he would stand at the, at the whiteboard or basically at the projector and look at the website. And he wanted to reduce the amount of font sizes that we were using for this website to two. And we maybe had 12 on there at the time. And it was this relentless, literally back and forth obsession between how can we simplify these layouts down to the core essence of what they're trying to say while still keeping them very unique and powerful? And watching him in action like that was extremely powerful to see. It just sticks with you once you're through that process. Once I see every layout that I look at now from that exact same lens, like, and just really question every single element on the page and try to understand why does it need to be here? What's the relationship between this component and another component and is there any way to remove it entirely and if not, reduce or, or, you know, or expand the size of this for, for a specific purpose? He's very, very good at that. He's also very good at entertaining, which is nice.
- [13:12]
Rid
What do you mean by the entertaining piece?
- [13:13]
Marvin Schweibold
Something that I learned from him is there's this difference between educating a client or educating a room versus entertaining a room. When you're entertaining, I think people are more inclined to listen to you and to. And to follow your ideas versus educating clients or peers or colleagues can often come across as maybe more patronizing. And Brian just had aura of like, when he came into a room or when he worked with us on things or we started, we hosted a lot of demo nights with them. He would be very good at just entertaining the room and keeping the room inspired and for lack of a better term, just like, happy. Like everybody was always having a lot of fun.
- [13:46]
Rid
Were there practical ways that you tried to apply that in future interactions with other clients?
- [13:52]
Marvin Schweibold
Yeah, definitely. I feel it's a core part of how Molly ran. It's a core part of how we Work together at Shopify and how the product design studio runs. It's a core part why we were acquired by Shopify. If you're not having fun with the people that you're working, then I think that seldom produces very good creative output. There's this quote from Robert Henry, who was an American painter and writer, who said, the goal in life isn't to create art, but to create a life that is so wonderful that art is inevitable. It's this idea of, like, how you show up is just more important than what you show up to, which was going back to, like, the team constellation, like, always. Our philosophy of, like, the best people who are really passionate about something, and then an environment of, like, sure that they. That they have fun. And that was something like Brian and the whole Collins teams, like, really worked on and that, like, stuck with us.
- [14:42]
Rid
Well, I want to get into how you create an environment where art is inevitable at Shopify. Maybe just really quickly to give people a little bit of context. Can you just explain how the Shopify product design studio works, how you plug in, how you fit into the broader design. Org?
- [15:00]
Marvin Schweibold
The product design studio at Shopify works in two ways. We sit alongside the product organization, and teams from the product organization come to us with ideas, with problems, with theories, with things they want to jam on. And so we treat the studio similar to how we would treat an agency in the way that we will take on these projects, we will scope these projects, and we will introduce a burst of energy into whatever these teams are working on or will work alongside them, usually very, very intertwined with their teams on a specific problem. The other way the studio works is we find things that we get really obsessed about. Now, that could be internal software that we're building for ourselves and our workflows. That could be something that we're seeing in the company that maybe nobody else is focusing on right now or has the ability to focus on. And we'll take those projects into our studio as well and create almost an initiative out of it, which has worked really well. It's super fun because it creates so much context. Like, we work with so many different teams across such a multitude of surfaces, from checkout to point of sale to the dashboard and the admin and sidekick and all of our AI functionalities. And everybody has a different opinion, a different lens, and we need to use our team in a different way to get to specific outcomes. And that plays really nice into how we just build for our team as well. Like, we'll build internal tools or internal dashboards to make our life easier and easier. And usually that then lends itself useful to other people in the organization as well. And so that kind of, like, creates this feedback loop of, like, we built something, somebody else uses it as well. And everybody, like, tinkers and works together on it. But that's basically how our. How the whole team operates.
- [16:44]
Rid
I've been seeing some of the internal tools on Twitter recently, and I'm curious, like, even something like Artifact, like, is that something that's coming out of the studio? Like, what are some of the things that you've been obsessed with lately that you've been tinkering with?
- [16:58]
Marvin Schweibold
Shopify is a remote first company. We're remote by default. But we come together in offices, and especially here in New York, we have a design lab that we're working on right now. But innately, it's remote. And that means that people need to be aware of what other people are working on. And Artifact was a way for us to create a really easy and frictionless way to just upload work. And the thing is, we have videos and figma files and demos and snippets of vibe, coded dashboards, all these different pieces that live in different environments. And RTFK is a place where you can just upload all of it and view it all at the same time. And it makes staying up to date, date with the work really easy. And it. And it makes reviewing work really easy as well. This is exactly like what I was talking about. This is something that innately came from the team, it came from the studio, and then was respected and pushed and protected by leadership, funded, for lack of a better term, to push it up to the broader organization. But that's how the whole company basically works. Everybody's a toolmaker.
- [17:56]
Rid
I want to dig into what it looks like to kind of be this injection of energy through a product team. Can we just go absurdly deep into how you all collaborate? Like, what are you doing to foster this environment of creativity with a team? What the deliverables even are that you're bringing to the table?
- [18:13]
Marvin Schweibold
On the one hand, the way we work together as a team is that there's a group of experts that are all very good at very specific things. We have motion design, we have product design, we have art direction, we have engineering. And everybody has almost, like, special skills. And sometimes I feel like you need to create, like, an environment where all of those different skills and all those people feel comfortable enough to thrive in. And when you create that environment for people, it's easy to create. It's easy to create good work. So we take a lot of time to focus on the details, but we're also able to focus on the details because we have people on the team who are very good at micro interactions and motion, like, obscenely good at direction and product design. And like, we. We try to focus on as little things as possible with the most amount of people to get the best output out of the work. One of my biggest mentors, I don't think he knows I exist, but his name is Graham Duncan and he came up with the term wild gardening, which basically means if you put a bunch of wild flowers together, the output of that wild garden is innately more interesting than if it's. And if it's not a wild garden. The issue with that is, like, you have to create this environment in which those different wildflowers can basically thrive in. And I feel like everyone's genius is like, right next to their dysfunction. And everybody's good at one thing. And our job in the studio and our job in tech and at Shopify in general is to create an environment where everybody can thrive at the thing that makes them really, really good. And that's how we get really good output out of our team and out of ourselves. It goes back to the Robert Henry quote of, like, you have to be able to create a world that is fun to live in. And if it's fun to exist and live in, in the world or in the environment, then creating art is just inevitable. Like, it just is actually easy.
- [19:57]
Rid
I was kind of curious, like, how much the Molly Roots and almost that agency style way of working was persisting inside of Shopify. And it really actually sounds like everything in some sense is almost the same. Like you kind of get to be this almost horizontal layer that product teams tap. And even thinking about my own experience as a designer, I would have loved, loved to be able to tap you guys to get like motion help or crank up the creativity or just get a fresh perspective on something. It sounds like a really interesting setup.
- [20:27]
Marvin Schweibold
We try to inject as much just positivity and energy and uniqueness into. Into everything that we work on at Shopify. And I feel like the agency model helps us create and maintain that team of almost misfits that all work together and solve the same problem, but from their specific lens. This was early on in my. My career. I was working with Jesper V, talented engineer, and Yael Beanstalk, who now works on art team. She's a motion designer. And we worked on this portfolio for a photographer that then ended up winning Website of the day, Website of the month. And like blew up. Became really big for this photographer called Meline Della. And I remember the synergy between the three of us was beautiful because I was focusing on art direction and on typography and on layouts. And Yael was really into like animating and, and transitioning between all these different funds that I was using. And Jesper was in charge of basically putting it all together, making it exist on the web. But there was no hierarchy between the three of us. There was no handoff process. Like the back in the day you'd have the waterfall process. Right? Was like design hands off to motion, motion hands off to engineering. And then engineering takes, takes it home. This was weeks and weeks and weeks. It felt more like a helix. We were just spinning around each other and everybody had notes on everybody else's work and we just evolved it until the three of us were like really, really happy with the work. And then we pushed it out. And I think that's exactly how. How we work in our. In, in our studio now. There is almost no end state to. To a project. It has to get to a point where everybody's given as much of what makes them unique in the team to the project. And then it'll usually be in a state that you otherwise couldn't get to.
- [22:05]
Rid
I love the mental picture of a helix. And it's also interesting how frequently you bring up motion and animation as a core component of what all. What you guys are exploring. Do you think that motion is more a part of the core DNA of what you all bring to the table? Maybe more so than a traditional product
- [22:23]
Marvin Schweibold
work 100 I think that motion can hint at the hierarchy of the content that you're. That you're looking at. Right. So we would build a website and you would click on a CTA and a sheet wood overlay that sheet. Sheet quite literally overlays itself over the website. And now your mental understanding of where that content lies is, oh, it lies on top. So that means if I press escape, maybe the sheet goes back and you're back on the main page. Like being able to visualize an animation like that through a view transition and making that the motion very linear and showing to the user exactly what's happening next is very important for users to understand. To understand what's happening. I mean that's. There's a very great video from. From the Human interface team from 2019 called Designing Fluid Interfaces that speaks about all. All of these complexities and the idea of how motion shows hierarchy and you use animation to basically explain what the interface is doing. It's, it's a, it's a key part of understanding, of understanding everything. And it just brings together obviously with I think strong, strong topography and strong layouts, just a lot of emotion or it can evoke a lot of emotion in users when they're interacting with products, with brands.
- [23:32]
Rid
I want to keep pushing on just everything that you're doing to foster creativity and to truly differentiate with design. I'm curious, is there an example that we could point to or something that would kind of shine a light on what collaboration looks like for you all?
- [23:49]
Marvin Schweibold
We're about to launch shopify.design, which is an internal project we've been running to really actually shine a light on design and Shopify and that talented different people we have in the whole organization. And we're bringing all of that together in like one website and one brand. And that brand started off in Figma and we did a bunch of layouts and art direction and you understand the structure of what it is that you're building and the mark and all of that. And then it translated very quickly into, into motion studies of how the brand would move, which then translated into a vibe coded tool that, that, that JTEL and the team was working on that basically became an editor to emulate what the animation was doing. And that then became the foundation for the website we're building for it right now. So it's like this idea of like everything we build inside of our team triggers something else in somebody else's brain and then they use what they're innately good at. Could be motion, could be coding, could be art direction, could be product to contribute to that mission or to contribute to that project. And I think that was one of the funnest projects we've worked on since we've worked at Shopify right now. And it's being received really well internally and everybody's obsessed with it. And it's definitely a nod at the constellation of the team, not just our team, but a nod at like how to get to these like high impact outputs. And I feel like the thing that I keep coming back to is this quote from Frank Slopman, who's the CEO of Snowflake, which is narrow, the plane of attack. Right? You don't want to be a mile wide and an inch deep with your team. That's how you lose creativity, that's how you lose the environment where somebody with a specific skill set can be successful and can work it. You want to keep the team together. You want to keep the team really close and you want to sequence more than you do parallel. You sequence one after the other. We'll work on this together and then we work on the next thing together. And everybody sticks together and inspires each other and works together, versus everybody's out on their own doing multiple projects at the same time.
- [25:47]
Rid
I want to go even deeper on that piece because the sequencing thing is interesting, especially through the context of, like, a new Shopify dot design, because there are so many stakeholders and interested parties, right? So, like, how do you narrow the point of attack when you're creating something that presumably a lot of people have a say in or want to, you know, voice some type of an opinion? Like, it's one thing to have creative ideas, but it's a totally other thing to maintain that creativity as it progresses through an org.
- [26:19]
Marvin Schweibold
You start with Mark and you start with. With a mood board, and you start with a vision, an idea, and a world that you want to kind of create. I think we're very good at bringing together all of the people on our team to create, even if it's just a mood or vibe of like, this is what we want to build and get people excited about it. And if you can get people excited about what you're doing, then you can start to create momentum. And if you start to create momentum, that then helps you to. To flow through and then you tackle every piece of the project, one, one after the other, and bring people along for the journey. I think that's, to us, a very important part. We have a lot of counterparts on these projects, a lot of people who are stakeholders in these projects. And the most important thing with all of this is just like, bringing them along, like, showing them the thinking behind how did we land on this and why did we land on this? And how do we think this positively impacts what we're all trying to achieve and selling them over? And once they're sold over and once they're on your side, it becomes a lot easier to then just progress as a unit and move forward. And I feel like in some ways that's a very healthy approach to look at, to look at projects. We looked at a layout for this, for this website last week, and we were all in the mindset of, like, this is really good, but it's also time, like, this has to go out into the world. This has to be launched inside of our company. This has to be digested and metabolized by us, by the stakeholders, by our colleagues, and then we can continue working on it. Which goes back to my main point around working in agencies versus working in house in agency. It's more of this finite idea of like the website that we've worked on with the client has to launch on this specific date and it has to go out and then it's goodbye and a handshake with your client and you kind of never really see them again. Which is not how we approach org at Molly at all. Launching a website for a client was 50% of the way there. After we launched, the website became the real, the real challenge of testing the layouts, testing our components, testing our strategy, and oftentimes including our own website at the time, we'd have up to 30 versions of that website live. And we're continuously AB testing or MAB testing, multi ARM banded, testing the website and the hierarchy of that website against the market and just figuring out what stuck and what made sense. Because my assumption of where I want the carousel component to be on the website is a personal assumption that I have or the studio can have. That doesn't mean that that's how the market or the users will react to that component. So reshuffling content on say a website for instance, or a dashboard was a, was a really important part for us to figure out why in what order are we even things in this was part of what I guess also separated us from a lot of other digital agencies was more of this product thinking background that we just applied to websites. We thought about websites and products, we solved them in the same way.
- [29:03]
Rid
And you probably fit in quite well then at Shopify and more of the, the impact that Toby has had on the culture as well, which makes me even kind of curious. Like you've worked with some pretty incredible people over the course of your career. And I think you, you know, you already mentioned different ways that, you know, working with people like Brian or other clients have kind of shaped you and what you've brought to the table. As a designer, are you able to already see the way that Toby is kind of rubbing off or influencing the way that you approach the practice of design?
- [29:33]
Marvin Schweibold
The way he approaches everything is through this innate lens of he's hyper obsessed and just curious about everything and anything that is going on at all times, which is liberating because it allows you to ideate and to, and to iterate and to understand all the new tools that are coming out right now, especially in this AI boom that we're in right now. But more so, I think the credit goes especially also to Carl Reyer, like our chief design officer who just creates a very beautiful culture in which we're allowed to exist and work in. And I feel like there's something in the way he approaches work and in the way Toby approaches that just resonates a lot with how we like to approach things. Like, our output is really, really high because we try to iterate and ideate through as much ideas as possible in the fastest amount of time just to get to an endpoint where we can look at a lot of different things that we've worked on and then from there you can pick strings or channels to follow and fall deeper into. And I think there's something also to be said about working at a company where the founder is so deep in the work. Toby's in the code all day.
- [30:43]
Rid
But seeing the commit graphs.
- [30:46]
Marvin Schweibold
Yeah, the commit graphs are crazy. I AI is obviously accelerating a lot of this for us, but I think I wouldn't want to work company where the founders and the leaders of the company weren't as obsessed with the current state of affairs, I think in design and AI as they are. Which I guess maybe brings me more to the main way we like to work within the team and at Shopify in general is just through the work. We manage each other through the work, we show up through the work, we show each other the work. We identify through the word. The work is what you bring to meetings. We have a stand up with our team every morning. Everybody shows up with work and what they've been working on and we're brutally honest with each other. Usually I'm the one who gets in trouble, but ideally people on the team that have a lot of feedback for you and you just work through it with them together and then you show up next day or a few hours later with more ideas and more iterations and there's just this constant contributing to the mission, Shopify and of commerce that we're all like, really into.
- [31:43]
Rid
One thing that dive club has made abundantly clear to me over the last year is that the practice of design is changing and the whole process of getting feedback just doesn't quite cut it in today's world. That's why I'm excited to announce that Inflight is officially in open beta. It's the feedback tool that I've always wanted and it's built for a world that moves at the speed of AI, so I can share my prototypes, give context in video walks, walkthroughs. And Inflight makes it easy to get the exact feedback that I need to move forward, whether it's voting on Directions or maybe even getting the green light to ship a new idea. And all of this is available in a single link that I can drop into Slack or maybe even share with power users to test out a new prototype. I use Inflight every day, and it's totally transformed the way that I share work. So I'm excited for you to try the product, and if you. If you ever want to jam about it, just email me at ridflight Co. How has all these new capabilities impacted the way that you all are operating? Can you talk a little bit? I mean, you mentioned JTEL Vibe coding tools. Like, how has that influenced the practice of design for you?
- [32:51]
Marvin Schweibold
Immensely. It's an immense. It's an immense shift, it's an immense impact, and it's a huge unlock. I feel like the way we're able to show up as designers through the new technology, especially Opus 4.6 and codecs at the moment, is just fascinating and really fun to see. Like, this doesn't mean that we stray away from what makes us successful and what makes us unique and what makes us good. We have. I wouldn't call them swim lanes, but we stick to Figma, into After Effects and Photoshop and all these very ingrained tools to get to specific outcomes and to get to specific ideas. But then switching and using agents to get to that next level is fascinating. Like going back to the Shopify design example, there was a lot that went into the uniqueness of making that animation, that the motion behind that whole brand is very, very unique. Coming up with a tool to replicate that motion was difficult enough to do, but it wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have. We were able to output work and the way we're able to put prototypes together has entirely shifted for the whole company. For the whole company. I think there's. We have. The data at the Moment shows that 50% of all designers are using AI tools all the time. Actually, in our onboarding Shopify, you have to commit at least two pull requests as a designer to the main code, like, to the main branch.
- [34:10]
Rid
Really? Oh, that's cool.
- [34:11]
Marvin Schweibold
It's an innate responsibility we all have at Shopify to use the tools and to use tools at our disposal and for the work that we do.
- [34:19]
Rid
There's a tension that maybe exists in somebody who's listening's mind. I kind of have it in my mind where on one hand, we talk a lot about how AI coding tools almost narrow our playgrounds and they kind of, you know, push us down a smaller subset of the spectrum and we're like solutionizing in this little area where a lot of the things that you're talking about is clear. You're able to just crank through concepts and just throw a bunch of the things at the wall. And that's kind of a core part of how you have OPER for a long time. Even going back to, you know, talking about the Collins website and making hundreds of versions of what this could look like. Talk to me a little bit about that tension. Like, how do you maintain the same levels of creativity when you are playing in code rather than, you know, something that feels a little bit more familiar?
- [35:11]
Marvin Schweibold
As a designer, it's an important question. It's something that I wouldn't say struggle, but that we very much discuss, especially within our team, a lot. On the one hand, you want to understand and digest and metabolize all of the new tools that are coming out. Like me personally, I've committed to GitHub 60, 70 times this year. I haven't committed a single time before this year. I didn't know how any of this really worked. And here I am like, cloning repos and building harnesses and working through with all of the new tools, right? Like, I have an open claw bot on Telegram that like, calls me. On the other hand, I feel like, especially as creators, as creatives, you don't want to lose the thing that I guess to me, it's like the thing that got me to this point in time right now obviously wasn't coding tools because they just didn't exist. So, for lack of a better term, I feel like going back to your roots and using tools that you know how to use to solve problems is definitely not a bad thing. I don't think we should only rely on AI tools to solve our problems for us. But if you have an idea of what you want to do, if you understand the technology and the constraints and how they can help you, then opening up cursor or terminal and switching to one of the newest models and going into plan mode and explaining to it exactly what you wanted to do and watching it go off is some of the most, like, magical experiences I've had so far in my career. And it's unlocked me a bunch because you don't have to persuade a motion designer or a developer to come along with you on a journey to get to a prototype to then convince maybe your group or the larger organization of something. Right? And I feel like that's oftentimes what we've always been working towards and what makes us so unique in. In the design field is you want to accumulate and you want to have players on your team that can all together create really, really beautiful prototypes. We used to do that with origami and with After Effects and Figma and, and Motion and Figment and all of these different tools. That is a lot easier to do with code at the moment. You can plug Cursor into Xcode and you can start working on a new version of the Shop app. And that just wasn't available before this time. So I feel like what I'm seeing a lot with our team and with designers on all of these different teams is just like it's unlocking everyone a ton and it's creating so much more output that creates so much more reactions and that then all accumulates to just better output for everyone.
- [37:41]
Rid
You've definitely been AI pilled. You even have the open claw Telegram setup going on. And I think it's also important to like highlight the fact that like, you've been doing this for like 60 days. Like we're talking about less than 60 days of committing to the code base. So you are not that far ahead in the grand scheme of things than somebody who, listening, who maybe knows that it is important but hasn't taken some of those steps yet. So, like, what are some of the things that you've learned in the last 60 or so days that you think other designers who potentially maybe are on the sidelines could benefit from again?
- [38:14]
Marvin Schweibold
And this comes back to the, to the idea of curiosity and being able to just use these tools and get inspired by the tools. If you haven't used an agent before or one of these models before, just use them. Like get on a subscription plan and figure out something that you want to build. I feel like a lot of the times, especially as designers, everybody's working on a project right now. You can literally open up your computer, go into figma. There's something open in Figma that you probably need an engineer or a whole team of engineers or motion designers to work on. Throw it into Claude code and let it have a go. Let it have a go at the problem and see what it outputs. It's a skill that everybody has to pick up and everybody has to learn. I would just advise people to just don't be afraid of it. Just start using the tools. As you start using the tools and you start building more context and awareness of how the tools actually work, it's. It's a lot easier to start to understand them and trust them and work and work better with them. I think I'VE gotten really far in a short amount of time. But I also have a very strong team around me of people who motivate me, who help me push me. We work primarily in person, so everybody's sitting next to everybody and we're always working on things together. It's so much easier to tap someone on the show and be like, hey, I need to get up to Token or an API or something. I don't know how to do that. Oh, yeah, don't worry about that. Like, you can find that over here or ask your bot. Like, just ask it. The tools are innately patient. This is the most patient teacher you will ever have. Screenshotting your desktop with the arrow state and throwing that back into terminal and telling it I don't understand what's happening here will probably solve the issue.
- [39:49]
Rid
I do that 30 times a day easily.
- [39:51]
Marvin Schweibold
Yeah, you screenshot and you send it back and it understands what's happening, what's going wrong, and then you can have it explain it to you too, as well. I do this all the time. Like, before you do this, explain to me what you're going to do and why, and that oftentimes helps me understand the complexity of what it's doing.
- [40:05]
Rid
I appreciate how approachable you made it there. Because I've been like, yesterday somebody messaged me and they're like, you know, do you have a good cloud code tutorial? I'm like, you don't understand. You can literally have your first prompt be like, I have no idea what you are or what I can do or what to do. Like, I, you know, I don't know anything. I know nothing about code, but I have this idea. Can you just talk to me about, like, what does it look like to collaborate with Quad to bring an idea to life and it will get you there. It will get you there. You might have to pay some error messages in and some random screenshots, but the amount of times even that I, like, take a screenshot of a terminal, paste it in there and just say, now what?
- [40:43]
Marvin Schweibold
If anything, what I'm. What I'm trying to get at the onboarding for Claude code is opening Claude code. Like, start talking to it and start just basically interacting and having a conversation with it back and forth. I'm working on a demo right now for something and I'm not even. I've gotten past this point now where I'm not even trying to be like, hyper specific. I can sometimes, if you're in the right mindset with the tool or in the flow, I'm in right now I'm talking to it more like how I would speak to an engineer. Like, I don't like how this feels right now. Can we work on. On a different approach? And then it'll give me a list of like, what why don't you like, do you want to make it snappier or do you want to make it more bouncy? Or do you not like the way that it animates in oftentimes I'll also ask it. Ask me clarifying questions if you're unsure of my prompt because I'll ramble or send a voice note into the tool and then I'll have it spit back. Basically my idea to me with clarifying question that really helps not to plug in like other tools, but agentation for the listeners. Fantastic tool that you can.
- [41:43]
Rid
Yeah, it's a big deal.
- [41:45]
Marvin Schweibold
Just tell it to run it. It's point and shoot. And that is for like, for UI design. It's very good at like fine tuning and really helping you work out the details. I used to just screenshot things and then highlight, hey, this button needs to be over here. Or this font needs to be smaller. Agentation is a fantastic tool that basically helps you solve that.
- [42:03]
Rid
A new type of value that the Twitter feed is providing to me now is just people learning something. And then I just can grab the tweet and put it into cloud and be like, hey, look into this. Like, is there something that I should be tweaking or is there something that I should be learning or something I should be contributing to? Like a markdown file. Like, you don't even have to take all the way into the details. Like the amount of times I just feed cloud tweets. Like, is this, is this relevant? Is this relevant? Should we steal something here? And I've tweaked so many things about the way that I work just from pasting in tweets.
- [42:35]
Marvin Schweibold
Again, it shows to someone like you who's been using the models, the capabilities of these models. I think I brought this up earlier to you, but we vibe coded this really small tool over the holidays to Jtalamy just to create a sequence of images back to back and they would just cycle through. It's like an end of year recap that we wanted to post and we got it running. It worked pretty well. We were able to post our assets and then a few weeks later I needed it for something else again, but the tool that we had at the time was down. So I just screenshotted the whole tweet, threw it into Opus and just had it rebuild it for me from scratch again. And now it was my version of that tool. It worked perfectly. It one shot. It did. And I could just use it. So it also, I think, just says a little bit about that whole paradigm of throw away software and contextual software versus large tech software, which we're experiencing right now. And we're just entering a world where you'll be able to build tools for
- [43:35]
Rid
your specific workflow, which is a new creativity in itself. You know, like so much of the creativity that we're talking about is in the output. But what I'm finding is so many creative opportunities in what my design process could look like for this given challenge. Because it's like you can go in so many different directions. Maybe I build a tool, maybe I try a totally different way of feeding context to the models. Like. Like it's like a set of problems to solve before I even get to work on the actual design challenge. That is proving to be quite life giving for me.
- [44:04]
Marvin Schweibold
We were measured as creatives by our ability to understand the tools. The better you were at understanding after Effects or origami or any of these tools, for better or worse, ranked you higher or lower between your peers in an organization versus, I guess, the idea behind why you were using the tool. Right. And I feel like right now we're entering this world where the design process for everyone is becoming way more contextual versus before. Everybody has to open up the tool in the same way because the tool is just built in the specific way and the architecture and hierarchy of how the tool is created is always in the same way. I use four things in FIGMA every. Every time I open figma, I don't need half of the complexity that that tool brings. So a more lightweight version of that tool would be probably better for me to use. Right. That doesn't exist. You have to understand and work your way through the complexity of today's tooling and then use them in a specific way to get to the output that you want. And I feel like what we're seeing right now is people creating their own workflows. That alone is as creative as you can get. Building a set of tools and stringing them together in a way you want them strung together to get to your output. It's insanely cool to see. And it's like opening up all these new possibilities and doors, which I think people get too negative about tools in general, about AI. And I think a lot of people are very skeptic and worried about all of this stuff. I'm an atheist optimist. I try to see most things from, like. Like, through a lens of positivity. And, like, these tools are allowing me to do so much more than that I. That I just couldn't do before and are accelerating the pace at which I'm allowed to, like, execute and just sometimes also just metabolize my own ideas. Like, I don't have to go to somebody else to ask them to work on this project with me. I can get to a prototype that I can then show to a group of people way faster by myself, and that then might be inspiring enough of those people to get on board.
- [46:02]
Rid
A lot of what you're saying makes me think that the limiting factor is honestly just ideas. Like, if we're able to crank through that much more output, like you're talking about, maybe one of the main things that separates the truly great designers inside of an org is can you actually just be this well of ideas? Like, can you have something new to show up with, with on a regular basis at these standups or at crit or whatever your touch points are?
- [46:25]
Marvin Schweibold
I just have so many things that I always want to try or that I'm thinking about or that I see, especially when I'm on Twitter or just consuming information or reading books or articles or seeing other tools that people are creating. That whole quote, steal like an artist. Like, I learned graphic design by copying graphic design. Like, that was the main thing we had to do and that I tried to do. And I think, by the way, for listeners who are maybe also a little bit younger in their career, the best thing you can do when you see something that you really like that's really beautiful is try to recreate it. Like, take this, put it in Figma, rebuild it, try to find the right fonts, try to find the right assets, prompt them with Kriya if you have to, but rebuild that screen that you. That you looked at to understand, you know, the complexity and what goes into it. And the same thing I think right now for me goes towards these tools that people are posting. Like, there are so many cool things that people are doing with Open cloudbots, right? Like, every time I open up any social media profile, I'm like, okay, there are nine new ideas that I now have that I want to feed to my bot. Or there are four new things that this thing animates and that I want to try out now. Or the way this person is putting something together is like, and now you have a. Now you have agents, hundreds of agents working for you that can do all these things. And I feel like, yeah, I don't know. Toby always says and say like, AI turns some people into like 100x and other people stay at their level. I feel like that's just what it is. Like, I think AI is enabling people with agency and people who want to ideate and who want to move and who want to iterate to move way, way, way faster. And I think it's a testament and a test to all of us to see how fast we can understand all of these new models that are coming out and just using them to our advantage, strategically, to our advantage. Like, the goal shouldn't be to bycode for the sense of by coding. It should be to get to a point where now you need a tool to get to the next stage. I feel like I'm like 22 again. And like when I first got into web design and interactive design same. I feel obviously lucky and, and we brought this up before as well. It's like we are designers and engineers and for people who are listening to your podcast, product managers and leaders, we are expected to be at the cutting edge of all of these new tools. That's our industry and that's what we're doing and that's what we're working on. And having exposure and having people around you and an environment that allows you to create and mess with these tools and learn is. I mean, it's awesome. And it's like really cool to be, especially at Shopify, like, we really enable people and invoke that kind of freedom, but also responsibility to like, these things exist. Use them. You can use them. You can use as many tokens as you want at Shopify and just crank out as many, as many ideas as you need to to get to the results. And that's like something that we're all like really, really obsessed about and already excited about. I've seen so many people at the company who are so, so, so good at design and engineering start to learn how to use these tools and it's made them so much faster and there's so many more ideas. These aren't ideas that you would necessarily post on X or that will actually go into the code base the way they were vibe coded, but everybody's talking about them and they create so much more momentum within our teams. And it's just, yeah, it's a super exciting time to be around all of these.
- [49:35]
Rid
And it's not just faster too. Right? Like, it just allows people to raise the bar. Like it's, it's kind of a funny example now talking to you, but literally, I'm going to hang up this call, and the thing that I'm going to do next is I'm going to make a prototype. And it is directly inspired from someone on your team. I don't remember his name, but it's the web app for Shop. There's this, like, panel interaction that I love. Like, you, like, click on a category and it, like, adds a second layer and almost blurs the background behind it. And I had it saved, and I was like, oh, man, that gives me an idea for something that I'm working on. I have no idea how to make it. I have no idea. So much so that I wouldn't even attempt to mock it up statically in FIGMA years ago, because I actually don't really understand. I wouldn't have thought that it was possible until I saw it. And I'm like, I'm just gonna see. Like, I'm just gonna try and see if I can make this happen. And I. I have no idea if it'll work or not, but it's so clearly raising the ceiling of what I consider the possibility set of deliverables. As a designer, Like, I wouldn't even have touched something in that tier. And now I'm like, yeah, I mean, to an extent, I feel like I can do anything. I just need to try, you know,
- [50:50]
Marvin Schweibold
what a wild time to be able to do stuff like that. This wasn't possible before, and you can
- [50:56]
Rid
get, like, a little win under your belt. And after you get a few of them, you're like, okay, what if I
- [51:00]
Marvin Schweibold
did a little bit more?
- [51:00]
Rid
And what if I did a little bit more and I just keep pulling back the slingshot a bit further each time before I just launch it and see what I can make? And, you know, the things that I'm working on now are in a different stratosphere than what I was working on last month. So I think it really does come down to just, man, just try. Just get some reps. Like, if you're listening to this and you haven't put in some reps, like, just try to make something, because it really actually is easier than it seems until you get in there and you're like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I just worked.
- [51:28]
Marvin Schweibold
It's like anything in life. It's like learning an instrument, right?
- [51:30]
Rid
Like.
- [51:30]
Marvin Schweibold
Like, you just have to use it. Like, you have to use the tools and understand them.
- [51:34]
Rid
All right, well, we've covered a lot of ground, Marvin, before I let you go, I want to tie this back to something that Carl Rivera was talking about, because we had him on the podcast, the Chief Design Officer, a few months ago, and he basically was, like, talking about why he acquired Molly and pointing at, yeah, one, this injection of energy and kind of, you know, shaking things up. It was also tied to this goal of design differentiation and how important that is moving forward. So I'm kind of curious for your perspective, like, when you look into the future and dream about what design differentiation looks like for Shopify and how this can be a competitive advantage in the long run. I'm curious what types of things come to mind for you?
- [52:22]
Marvin Schweibold
I think design differentiation, to me means one, we are, as a company, able to iterate at the speed of conversation and at the speed of technology moving, which is something that's very important to Shopify. I think design differentiation means that in the future, we're looking at more of a malleable interface that morphs and shapes itself around contextual needs of the merchants, more so than at maybe one specific, like art direction or admin uplift, for lack of a better term. And I think design differentiation also means just like. Like, really honing in on. Honing in on the details. I feel like we're very good. Like, artifact is a good example of something that is vibe coded and put together by a team of people who wanted to solve a problem. But the branding behind it, the animations behind it, the logo behind it, and all of these little micro interactions that we added to the tool to make it feel like something really, really, really beautiful that you want to interact with is what gives it salt and what gives it meaning and what gives it excitement. And I think you have to marry those two worlds together to get to that outcome.
- [53:30]
Rid
Well, maybe you just laid the foundation for a future malleable software at Shopify Episode that I'm already looking forward to. And, Marvin, thanks for coming on, man. This has been really, really fun. Big fan of everything that you're doing, and I appreciate you sharing a little bit about your journey and the types of things that you're working on today.
- [53:48]
Marvin Schweibold
Appreciate you. Thank you so much, Brett. Thank you. This was great.
- [53:52]
Rid
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 Club Partners.