Lyft’s VP of Design: 8 Principles on Scaling a Design Team

Author: Dave Benton / Source: 99U by Behance

For Lyft’s VP of Design Katie Dill, building a team is like mixing a great cocktail – it’s about finding the right balance of ingredients. Here’s a peek into her approach.

When Katie Dill joined Lyft as vice president of design, she had a team of 40. In just over a year, she’s grown that number to more than 100.

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Dill, who was formerly the director of experience design at Airbnb, knows a thing or two about what it takes to build a thriving team at a fast-growing tech company. In a recent interview with 99U, she shared her strategies for hiring the right people, executing on a vision, and creating a culture that scales with the company.

Here are her top principles for building a design team.

1. Get designers involved from the ground up.

Lyft’s design team used to operate as a centralized design agency, coming up with solutions when approached by product teams. Today, the team is integrated in every step of the product development process, which Dill says has led to more creative, customer-driven results. “It’s a great example of how design is a part of the product development process at all stages, and how design is partnering with product management, engineering, and data science to determine the right thing to do for our consumers and our drivers,” she says.

“For example, we go on city tours with our product partners which helps us identify opportunities together.”

2. Think of building a team as mixing a great cocktail.

One area where managers tend to develop a blind spot is in who they hire – often, they look for the same type of person over and over without thinking of the overall mix of skills, backgrounds and perspectives needed for the team to thrive. Dill, however, likens her approach to building a team to mixing a cocktail. “You really have to think about the different way that ingredients play off each other – to create a nice comprehensive and elegant composition,” she says. “When I think about building a team, I look at all of that. Do we have people who are going to lead? Do we have people who are going to support that leadership? Are we going to have people to fill the different skills that we need? Having a diverse team not only leads to more comprehensive work, but a greater diversity of ideas and learning opportunities for all.”