Designer and developer. Principal designer at Shopify; before that head of design at Hypermode (with Kevin Van Gundy, acquired) and, in 2024, Director of Design at Clerk.
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Their wordsI think companies are wasting their time if they're trying to hire tons of these people to be responsible for all these areas when you can very horizontally deploy them through Markdown files.
Derek BriggsDesigner and developerI think it's incredibly critically important to deploy taste and craft and quality and knowledge around what tools we need to use and what strategies we need to use to achieve the level of quality we're looking for. We need to document those in just simple markdown files of how I'm approaching this, what I'm doing, and here's the outcome. So that those skills can then just be deployed through our skill packages throughout our designers and our engineers to where greatness accidentally happens.↗Derek Briggs - Scaling craft at Shopifyyoutube.com · 3 Nov 2026 · 26:32 into the videoAll korrents from this video
Their wordsI think it's incredibly critically important to deploy taste and craft and quality and knowledge around what tools we need to use and what strategies we need to use to achieve the level of quality we're looking for. We need to document those in just simple markdown files of how I'm approaching this, what I'm doing, and here's the outcome. So that those skills can then just be deployed through our skill packages throughout our designers and our engineers to where greatness accidentally happens.
Their wordsI say all the time that the users never see the Figma files. Like, your design quality and your design capabilities of your team is only as good as the UI engineers that are implementing it.
Their wordsI think people need to be ruthless around knowing and being confident that the solutions that they're designing and shipping are meeting the goals that they set out to achieve. If you're shipping something without any sort of data around its success, I don't understand how you'll be able to know if what you did was the right thing for the company or not.