Dive Club 🤿 Katarina Batina - Making big bets with design
May 12, 2026
Katarina Batina, Design Director behind the Shop app who prototypes in code and builds ambitious consumer shopping experiences. She discusses turning shopping into entertaining feeds, using AI and merchant posts to bring content to life, bold bets like native storefronts, and how designers prototype with real data while balancing metrics, risk, and vision.
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Shop App Origin And Super Feed Vision
- Shop combined Arrive (package tracking) and Shopify Pay to become a merchant-first shopping platform focused on trust and personalized storytelling.
- Katarina describes the super feed as content-driven window shopping that prioritizes brand stories over dense product grids.
Initial Super Feed Prototypes Made Data Teams Nervous
- Early super feed prototypes worried product managers and data scientists because they broke conventional density-driven commerce norms.
- Katarina credits organizational willingness to take bets and later adding AI-driven video and merchant posts to enliven the feed.
Prototype By Tapping Production Data Quickly
- Prototype with real production data using harnesses like Pi and Cloud Code and host shareable previews in Quick to validate product direction.
- Luke Dupont built a merchant storefront grid that configures live online store data to make the idea tangible.