Meet the Team: Anita Lillie, Product Design Leader

Artificial intelligence can help with a lot of things—but what about the uniquely human tasks of creativity and empathy in design? Anita Lillie, Senior Principal Product Designer at Amplitude, tests the bounds of that question every day. With over fifteen years in the design field, Anita uses her passion for learning to explore the balance between AI’s speed and her own creativity as she builds new ways for our users to find that same balance in Amplitude.

Keep reading for Anita’s take on the excitement of designing solutions, how to avoid getting trapped in AI workflows, and what she’s building in her free time. (Hint: Her cat may or may not be excited when she finishes.)

How did you get into product design? What do you love about it?

I was a software developer for nine years out of college, and I was really interested in data visualization. For my master’s degree, I wrote an app to visualize music libraries, and then I went to Nokia Research Labs to envision the future of interacting with gigantic data sets. I loved being able to build far-out ideas and actually make something I’d previously only imagined. And I loved watching how people used these things I made, to notice where they saw magic and where they got tripped up.

At the same time, there was this new thing that people in the data space were talking about called “data science.” I learned that LinkedIn had started the first team of data scientists and that they built products from data. And I thought, “I want to go there. I want to do that.”

So I interviewed for a data science role at LinkedIn in 2010—a whole day of interviews with data scientists—and at the end of the day, the head of design, Steve Johnson, came into the room and said, “I’d love for you to join our design team.” I told him, “But I’m not a designer, I don’t really even know what that is.”

He said, “No, you are a designer. You think like a designer. You’re building these apps, and you’re designing them at the same time.”

I’d never thought of design as a separate process—I was just building stuff, and I'd make design decisions while I was going to just keep building.

He convinced me, and I joined LinkedIn as a designer. The design team had only maybe a dozen people at the time, and I learned everything you do to “do design” on the job.

Turns out Steve was right: I was fascinated by how people understood and interacted with data, and I could personally make the biggest impact as a designer.

So I fell into design accidentally—and I’m so happy and thankful that I did. It’s exactly the stuff that I care about: I love learning, seeing how others learn, and making learning so easy that someone doesn’t have to think about it. In my career now, that means I work to make data inviting and actionable even for people who don’t think they like data.

How do you use AI in your design work?

AI just blows my mind. I worked on neural nets and ML models decades ago, but I never expected it would change my own experience this much.

AI helps me in many ways, but one of the main places is with information gathering and context setting. Especially as an employee at a new company—in past roles, I’d have to ask, like, five people to find the right person to answer a question about something, and now I can just ask Glean or ChatGPT or Claude. And I can ask as many questions as I want. It’s like a fire hose, but a forgiving one that’s there any time I need it.

For design, AI makes building prototypes so much easier, too. It’s addicting—I can build prototypes faster, get ideas out there faster, and test them faster, and I really want to just keep doing that every day. (We’re working that AI-powered speed into the Amplitude product itself, too, so our customers can continually find improvements.) It also lets me get back closer to the code—I’m able to see and touch the code without having to build the foundation myself.

But even though AI is super mind-blowing and very, very helpful, I think it’s really important to consciously step back and use my brain for the things it’s good for, like being humanly creative. I physically pull myself away from my computer and sit with pen and paper so I can sketch out my own ideas. When I return to my AI tools, I’ll steer it towards any promising paths it may have missed. AI currently does a great job of showing me the standard solutions, but the more creative ones are often missing or nonsensical.

With all the speed that AI automation brings to the design process, is there a risk of losing the user’s voice in the process? How do you keep user empathy at the forefront with AI?

That’s important to think about.

Various people will tell you that the quality of products that ship these days is lower because anybody can ship anything. But at Amplitude, we do not want to do that—we use AI to move faster, but we do that so we can test more things with real people.

Even when we use AI for automation, we still always pitch and test prototypes with real users. When we have a real product to test, we use Amplitude to run experiments with real users. The decisions get made based on real people, not AI making decisions about what’s the best thing.

What’s something you do outside of work to keep your passion for design going, or just to reset?

Tying back to the reason I love design: I’m really interested in how to make things easier for everybody to learn. My kids, who are one and four years old, are learning machines. Pretty much any interaction I have with them is very inspiring. I think a lot about toys these days and how my kids interact with and learn from them.

I do love making things, too—ideally, I'd spend half my time woodworking, but these days I don’t have a lot of free time. Every once in a while, though, I do get to build something.

What’s the last thing you wood-worked?

I’m currently making a cabinet to house my gigantic cat litter robot. Very Silicon Valley, I know. It’s going to have a cool light in it, and a little door—I’m really excited about it. I don’t know if my cat will like it… Haha, we should talk about cat user research at some point.

What sealed the deal for you about working at Amplitude? What are you looking forward to here?

Two things: the product and the people.

The product’s goal is to help companies build better products by making decisions grounded in data. When I’m doing product design, I always want a tool like Amplitude to help me stay connected to what users are really doing inside my product, and to help me find and fix the gaps towards an excellent user experience. It sounds a little meta, but being able to work on a product that would help me make a better product is just perfect.

The people I met during my interview process were some of the most motivated and human folks I’ve talked with in tech. They really think deeply about the problem at hand and have the humility to welcome other perspectives. They’ve created an environment of growth and learning that energizes me.