Palantir is one of the most powerful products in existence today.

It provides critical government and enterprise infrastructure from the factory floors to the front lines. You can literally build your own Airbnb on top of their development platform.

But with great power comes lots of complexity… So in this week’s episode, Design Lead Aashman Goghari gives us a behind-the-scenes of what it’s like designing products at Palantir.

• Becoming better at “problem decomposition”
• Two patterns for handling complex interfaces
• How to think through systems like a developer
• How data models can impact your design process
• Designing new user experiences for “Ferrari products”
• How to collaborate more effectively with backend engineers
• Finding the balance between edge cases and the golden path
• a lot more

• Aashman mentions the Concepts app for sketching on iPad
• Palantir is currently hiring designers
• You can follow Aashman on Twitter

When comes to brand design, Mike and Cara from Smith & Diction are pretty much top of the game (you might recognize them as the ones who did the brand identity for Perplexity).

During our interview, it didn't take me long to realize that these two have more hacks and mental models for creativity than just about anyone I’ve met.

So here are a few of my favorites.

Watch the full episode with Smith & Diction here: https://www.dive.club/deep-dives/smith-diction

If you asked me “who has the best taste in design right now?” one of the first people I’d mention is Thiago Costa.

His product Fey is in the S-tier of design and I’ve studied his visual techniques for many years.

Finally, after over a 12 months of pestering he agreed to share his secrets in a interview 🙌

We go deep into:

• Mastering the finer details of craft
• Putting AI at the heart of the new Fey 2.0
• Where Thiago draws inspiration outside of UI
• What it looks like to have a “heightened awareness”
• How Thiago evolved the Fey aesthetic from 1.0 to 2.0
• Specific visual techniques for making your UI more lifelike
• a lot more

• Caravaggio is the painter who Thiago calls the “master of light”
• The Local Project interior design channel on YouTube

Today we get to hear from Ammaar Reshi who is the Head of Design at ElevenLabs—the AI audio platform that has come up multiple times in past episodes.

So a big focus of this conversation is learning what it's like designing an AI-native product. We go deep into topics like:

• The backstory of Ammaar’s viral AI experiments
• Predictions for the future of voice as an interface
• What it’s like collaborating with an research team
• How he’s designing novel interaction patterns for AI
• What Ammaar looks for when hiring startup designers
• What it’s like designing at multiple hyper growth startups
• a lot more

• Thread of all Ammaar’s AI experiments (including the viral book and podcast app)
• Ammaar mentioned chatting with Nate Parrott from the Browser Company
• Ammaar mentions the Rabbit hardware product
• Ammaar mentions collaborating with his friend Pietro

How do designers from today’s top teams collaborate with engineers?

After many interviews I'm starting to notice a trend…

The highest functioning product teams throw away a lot of code and it’s a good model for what the new “handoff” process will look like. So this video highlights how it works at teams like Figma, Vercel, Perplexity, Airbnb, and more.

• Jenny Wen (OG designer of Figjam now at Anthropic)
• Teo Connor (VP of Design at Airbnb)
• John Pham (former design engineer at Vercel)
• Vincent van der Meulen (design engineer at Figma)
• Balint Orosz (cofounder of Craft Docs)
• Derek Briggs (Design + Code at Hypermode)
• Anthony Menecola (Staff designer at Shopify)
• Ammaar Reshi (Head of Design at ElevenLabs — episode coming soon)

This week's episode is with Chris Abad who has led design teams at companies like Google, Square and Dropbox so needless to say he's given a lot of design presentations over his 20+ year career.

So this conversation is a deep dive into storytelling and everything you can do as a designer to effectively share your vision and persuade stakeholders.

He shares every step of his process including a ton of practical tactics like:

• Strategies for designing a great deck
• How to set up Q&A for success with executives
• His new secret weapon software tool for storytelling
• Strategies for navigating pushback from stakeholders
• How to frame the “Peak Moment” of your presentation
• How he coaches designers to leverage storytelling in their portfolio
• a lot more

⭐ Don’t forget you can also save $100 on Chris’s Design Storytelling course using the code DIVECLUB

• Chris mentions the importance of the Story10x book
• IA Presenter is the new tool Chris uses for presentations
• Ridd uses SuperWhisper for transcriptions

Systems thinking is often mentioned as the #1 trait teams are looking for in designers.

But what does it look like to be great at it?

This episode answers that question by highlighting stories from Notion, Anthropic, and more 👇

This week's episode is with Anthony Menecola who is a longtime staff product designer at Shopify so we’re going to do a deep dive into ways you can make a bigger impact at your company as an IC.

One of the big themes of this episode is Anthony’s journey becoming more technical and contributing to the Shopify code base so if you’re interested in building your ideas I think you’ll get a lot out of this one.

We also talk about:

• The archetypes of staff designers at Shopify
• What it takes to create an impactful proposal
• Ways to build strategic relationships at Shopify
• How to strategically circulate your design ideas
• The art of sharing effective async video updates
• How Anthony identifies future-facing ideas to explore
• a lot more

• Anthony’s website and Twitter
• The Shop app

When I say high stakes design project, what comes to mind?

How about Ryan Scott redesigning the Airbnb checkout flow right before a  $3.5 billion IPO? Now THAT is a big time project…

So this episode is all about tactics you can use to make big ideas happen at your company (even as an IC).

And if you want to go even deeper you can use these links to get $100 off Ryan Scott’s top rated Maven courses 👇

1️⃣ Describing the ROI of Design (https://join.dive.club/ryan-scott-roi-course)

2️⃣ PM Masterclass for Designers (https://join.dive.club/ryan-pm-masterclass-course)

• Ryan Scott (design lead at Airbnb + DoorDash)
• Tyler Angert (1st designer at Replit and founder of Patina Systems)

What does it take to create a product worthy of winning Mac app of the year?

I interviewed the founder of Craft Docs, Balint Orosz, to find out…

So this episode is a deep dive into how they work and what it takes to achieve this level of design excellence, including:

• What Balint looks for in systems thinkers
• Craft’s plan to differentiate with personalization
• What it looks like for designers to take ownership
• How designers experiment with LLMs and shaders
• Behind-the-scenes of their viral “quick add” feature
• What makes Craft’s approach to product planning so unique
• The challenges of designing a user-generated content product
• a lot more

Introducing Craft 3