Dive Club 🤿 Marvin Schwaibold - Inside Shopify's New Product Design Studio
Apr 2, 2026
Marvin Schwaibold, designer and co-founder of Molly studio who joined Shopify to help build its Product Design Studio. He discusses Molly’s Collins redesign, how Shopify blends studio-style teams with product work, and using AI and tools like Claude Code to speed prototyping. He also explores motion as hierarchy, internal tools like Artifact, and how to organize creative teams for big design projects.
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Studio As Embedded Team And Internal Lab
- Shopify's Product Design Studio acts both as an embedded creative team for product squads and as a self-directed lab that picks company problems to solve.
- That dual model creates internal tools and initiatives that other teams adopt, forming a feedback loop.
Make A One Place For Design Work
- Build lightweight internal platforms for sharing multimedia work to keep remote teams aligned.
- Artifact was created so designers could upload videos, Figma files, demos and code snippets into one searchable place.
Wild Gardening Produces Better Creative Output
- High-performing creative teams are 'wild gardens' of specialists whose strengths and dysfunctions sit side-by-side.
- Studio's role is to create an environment where motion, art direction, product and engineering can all thrive together.