Carl Rivera
Chief Product Officer at Nubank, appointed May 2026; before that at Shopify (Chief Design Officer; VP of Product, Merchant Services) and co-founder and CEO of Tictail, which Shopify acquired in 2018.
Carl Rivera did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
Filter All topics · Newest first
-
Their words"Hire smart people and get out of their way" is some of the worst management advice in tech. Hire smart people and get in their shit. Build trust. Work through hard problems together. Create alignment.
- 11 months earlier
-
Their wordswhen you're heading into a future that feels like it's covered in the clouds, there's no better tool to imagine it than through design. Because design has this magical capability of bringing everyone in on the same version of the future.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 1st of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordsI really think that how we do work immediately defines the work that we put out. Like, we cannot produce AI-first interfaces if AI isn't in a very big way influencing how we create them.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 2nd of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordsI have this view that we're in this period where all lines are blurring, and it involves how we do work. So designers need to think more and behave more like engineers and can also do more engineering-like work. And we have engineers and product leaders that can actually produce a lot of good design.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 3rd of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordswhat I hope we will get to is a world where we don't have to choose a modality so much upfront, where the way that you can move between imperative and declarative interfaces, chat and point-and-click, voice, you can shift in and out of them in a very, very fluid way.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 4th of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordsthe right form factor of AI will be when we stop thinking so much about AI. Like, it's just there. It's just how computers work. It's not a mode you go into.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 5th of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordsit will shift the role of the merchant from being an administrator of sorts to being an editor
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 6th of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordsI'm basically working on this assumption that we should work on the very long term and the very short term and cut out everything in the middle.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 7th of 13 in this recording
-
Our reading
It is extremely difficult to know what the world will look like six months or a year from now.
Their wordsIt turns out it's extremely difficult to know what the world is going to look like 6 months from now or a year from now.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 8th of 13 in this recording
-
Our reading
Shopify should not spread its design effort thinly and evenly across everything it makes.
Their wordsI think that Shopify should not peanut butter its efforts around design.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 9th of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordswe should double down on making them be 10 out of 10 experiences. And then I think a lot of our experiences can be vibe-coded 7 out of 10 things that use good component systems, are usable, but that you don't really even need to have a designer involved in them.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 10th of 13 in this recording
-
Their wordscan we bring that quality of software to a level where it's actually worth paying for? Like, it's actually worth choosing to not build it for yourself using some vibe code tool.
↗Tobi Lütke x Carl Rivera: Designing For Ambition (Context, Shopify)youtube.com 11th of 13 in this recording