Lynsey Thornton: Inside Shopify’s growth, re-organization, and design system

Show notes: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/lynsey-thornton

Over the last 10 years, Shopify has grown from a scrappy 5-person startup to a team of more than 3,000 across five locations. Scaling a company that fast takes a lot of talented people—and Lynsey Thornton is one of them.

As Shopify’s VP of UX and Core Product, Lynsey takes on an array of challenging tasks. In the first episode of the season, she talks about everything from building a leadership pipeline to governance of the famed design system Polaris. Her advice and first-hand experiences also highlight major technology pain points—like implementing customer-centric business models and helping individual contributors successfully transition to leadership.

Listen as Eli and Aarron talk about scaling design at Shopify with Lynsey—and don’t miss her biggest piece of advice for finding great org design inspiration.

Lynsey Thornton's Bio

Originally from Ireland, Lynsey is now the VP of UX and Core Product at Shopify in Vancouver, BC. With a background in design, project management, and business, she focuses on building UX teams and practices in high-growth tech companies.

Prior to leading Shopify’s front-end developers, designers, researchers, and content strategists—along with the team that builds the core product—Lynsey designed gaming and gambling experiences. In addition to UX, her true loves are ethnographic research and developing women in tech.

Follow Lynsey on Twitter @lynseythornton