“It's important to me that folks are not using AI to do 10 times more work. It's important to me that it's making them 10 times better. … What are you doing with the extra time? And that's, I think, the thing that's really important to me, that I'm spending the extra time that's now freed up on how can I make my work even better.”
Dive Club 🤿 · Product & Design · November 2026
Context
Asked what he looks for when hiring designers to raise the craft bar at Shopify, Briggs says some people use AI to do more output and get lazier. He wants people who put the time AI saves back into quality.
Transcript
…systematic level: how do we deploy this preference across an entire company, not just in a specific area? I think companies are wasting their time if they're trying to hire tons of these people to be responsible of all these areas when you can very horizontally deploy them through Markdown.
…want to bring into Shopify to continue to raise the bar for craft and quality, and what are some of the very specific things that you're looking for? Like, can we talk a little bit about your evaluation process for new hires? Because I know you're hiring for a bunch of different roles right now.
Yeah. It's really important to me that folks are not using AI to do 10 times more work. It's important to me that it's making them 10 times better. So what they used to be doing by hand all of the time and they're extremely good at, how can they make that even better? Like, how can they make the quality of that output even better? I also can sense some folks just getting lazier. And again, that's the part of doing 10 times more work because they're like, all right, I can automate all of this stuff. What I could do now, I can do a bunch of. Yeah, that's so true. And we all do that. But what are you doing with the extra time? And that's, I think, the thing that's really important to me is that I'm spending the extra time that's now freed up. And how can I make my work even better? And right now is influencing other people and influencing the output of other folks on our teams to reach their capability that maybe they didn't feel like they were that was possible. So it's a lot of sort of thought sharing and what I'm doing to inspire them so that they can start doing more of this stuff too. And again, that compounds…
think this conversation created a lot of alleyways for people to deploy that hunger and different rabbit trails to go down, even down to just how specifically you leveled up. I'm sure hundreds of people are going to use this as inspiration for easing curves and how products feel. And there's just…
Yeah, my pleasure, man.
Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget that every Thursday I go live with Tommy Gioko for Dive Radio, where we deep dive into trending topics and hear from a ton of incredible designers in the industry. So if you want to get that on your calendar, just go to dive.club/slash radio and I'll…
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