#21: Women as Natural Design Leaders with Katie Dill

In this episode of Designing Futures, Angela is joined by Katie Dill, head of design at Stripe. Katie is a design executive with a history of building outstanding teams and delivering impactful products with experiences that span from industrial, service, and digital design, to UX and business strategy. She was also named one of Fast Company’s “Most creative people in business”. Katie shares her thoughts and experience as a female leader in design - From the various traits leadership requires and why women are a great fit for those roles, her upbringing playing a part, and what inspires her to be a leader. Ang and Katie discuss the impact of design being connective tissue within organizations and strategies to maintain that status such as design systems and other techniques like a shared slide deck with status updates to help improve efficiency and transparency across various divisions or departments. Katie also compared and contrasted the different environment and workflow between her consultancy and corporate journey respectively and the different vantage points associated with each as well as the importance to the physicality of design and creative pursuits that shifted due to the remote culture brought in by the pandemic. Lastly, she discussed her “why” in raising her young children and motherhood.