Dive Club 🤿

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.

Rafa Conde, design engineer and maker behind Hand Mirror and playful products at Retro. He talks about crafting surprising, emotional moments in software. Short videos, humor, sound, haptics, and tiny surprises make interfaces memorable. He also discusses trade-offs between delight and accessibility and the craft of prototyping in code.

Polly D’Arcy, a design leader who rose from individual contributor to VP of Design at Wealthsimple. She talks about hiring specialists over generalists. She explains defining product quality with a clear hierarchy. She shares tactics for portfolios and interviews. She explores how AI changes team composition and amplifies different design strengths.

Brandon Jacoby, product and design leader who helped shape Cash App, Capital, and X, now running an independent practice. He talks about taste as a learned skill, how to spot versus create great design, using AI to build bespoke design tools, thriving in 0→1 environments, and practical lessons on onboarding, mentorship, and selling beyond “good enough.”

Brian Lovin, product and design leader who built AI prototyping at Notion and created the read-it-later app Shiori. He discusses shifting design workflows into code and prototype playgrounds. He covers using multiple models, tooling like Agentation and Conductor, prompt craft, hardening AI systems, and strategies for designers to stay relevant as AI changes how work gets shipped.

Ian Silber, Head of Product Design at OpenAI and former Instagram designer, talks about designing with AI and building reusable design systems. He explores using models as interface primitives, when to rely on UI versus model behavior, and the creation of a Dynamic Interface Library. Conversation highlights rapid prototyping, tools like Codex, and how design roles are evolving in an AI-first workflow.

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.

Flora Guo, a design engineer and founding design engineer at Paradigm known for her public design experiments and work at Vercel. She talks about building AI-first product workflows, using AI as a patient learning partner, experiments with tools like Variant and Paper, and how sharing playful projects and proactive outreach shaped her career.

Kris Puckett, a design leader at Stripe formerly at Dropbox and Mercury, who built the Epilogue reading app. He discusses building AI-native workflows, using Claude Cloud Code to prototype and create custom skills, teaching models niche expertise like metal shaders, and turning permissionless side projects into internal tools and career momentum.

Josh Puckett, product designer and founder of Interfacecraft with nearly two decades at Wealthfront and Dropbox. He talks about making onboarding feel special with a playable library card, crafting tactile, fidgetable interactions, building parametric playgrounds for generative graphics, and using storyboards plus AI to prototype rich, curious interfaces.