Katie Dill

Visual status updates (screenshots/prototypes) are more effective for alignment than text-heavy documents.

"What we do, and I've been doing it for the last decade or more, is having people within the design team share as a screenshot or a prototype of what they're working on in a shared deck... And we send..."

Prioritize innate taste and character over technical tool proficiency during the hiring process.

"The key, I think, to keep in mind is it's easier to teach tools and process than it is taste and character, so I would certainly pay a lot of attention to that. Their hit rate for great judgment and g..."

Asking candidates what they are most proud of reveals their internal quality bar and motivations.

"Tell me what work you are most proud of. And the reason I ask that is because it helps me understand their taste and their judgment, what motivates them, what work they view as good and as a good outc..."

Building trust through active listening and empathy is the foundation for leading organizational change.

"In retrospect, as hard as that was, I'm very grateful and very amazed that they could come together and share that with me. It can be hard to bring feedback forward like that. So it was an extremely v..."

Employees should feel a sense of belonging both to their functional discipline and their cross-functional product team.

"It's like, well, what T-shirt do you wear? What team are you on?' And I was like, 'You have two T-shirts. You have the Design T-shirt and you have the Marketplace T-shirt, or whatever cross-disciplina..."

Quality and craft should be an organizational operating principle, not just a design goal.

"Our operating principles include meticulous craft. It is one of the things that is really important to us as an organization is just having that meticulous care for all that you do, whether it's you'r..."

Team performance is maximized by simultaneously increasing individual potential and removing organizational blockers.

"Performance equals potential minus interference. And I really like this, it's pretty simple, but it's a good reminder that, as a leader, one of the things that you are of course driving towards is try..."

When receiving difficult feedback, the most effective response is to listen fully without immediate defensiveness.

"I walked into the room and there were five of them seated around the table. They had a pack of papers in front of them and they went on taking turns quietly reading from the papers all the things that..."

Tight integration between design and engineering, sometimes even reporting into the same org, accelerates the quality of execution.

"We have design and engineering and our product partners and product marketing work really, really closely on this. Actually, it's one of the few teams where all of these things report, well, not all o..."

A comprehensive North Star vision prevents teams from getting stuck in local maxima through purely incremental improvements.

"Reach for the stars and land on the moon. And what I mean by that is that vision work is really important... vision work that absolutely does look at the entirety of the experience, a comprehensive ap..."