Investor Sarah Guo wrote a beautiful post on building organizational taste: ​“Start with the founder edit. Early on, every user-facing decision flows through one person — not for control, but for consistency. This only works with respect, explanation, and velocity. You’re not a bottleneck; you’re a tuning fork.

Then hire multipliers. A designer who codes. An engineer who notices typography. These people collapse the gap between vision and execution. They don’t just build what you describe — they build what you meant.

Dogfood religiously. Use your product the way customers will. Feel the sharp edges. Most teams test features; taste-driven teams test feelings. When something hurts, fix it. When something delights, double down.

Track delight debt alongside technical debt. Monitor the small things you’re not doing — the loading animation, the empty state, the error message personality. These compound into brand equity. Every rough edge you leave unfixed teaches your team that craft is optional.

Make quality a principle, not ​“quality” as bug-free, but quality as craft. The best engineers aren’t drawn to easy problems or high valuations. They’re drawn to teams that give a shit about the work itself. They want to build things that matter and feel pride in what they ship.

Create user exposure to cultivate this instinct. Engineers naturally optimize for efficiency. How do you get them to do something 10x harder for 10% better UX? Let them watch a user struggle with their ​“efficient” solution. Let them hear the confusion in a customer’s voice. User feedback is the best teacher — not because it tells you what to build, but because it shows you why craft matters.”

Linear’s CEO shares his approach to quality at a time when ​“move fast and break things” no longer cuts it. My favorites: ​“Commit to quality at the leadership level”, ​“Do away with handoff”, ​“For quality, you need a team that views the spec as the baseline, not the finish line”, and ​“The simplest way to increase quality is to reduce scope”.

Luis Ouriach sat down with the Figma team to talk about craft – what is it, how do they define it, and how can you get better at it. This is the first out of three videos in a new mini-series called Blend Mode.

Yann-Edern Gillet reflects on his first year designing at Linear: ​“Experiencing imposter syndrome has taught me to accept feedback—both positive and constructive—with openness and to lean on my teammates for perspective and support. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also a reminder that the work you’re doing matters. Over time, I’ve learned to reframe it as a driver for growth, reflection, and improvement, and that’s been one of the most rewarding parts of this journey.”

A great written interview with Katie Dill, Stripe’s Head of Design, about craft and quality, functionality and beauty in products, rituals to level up product quality, and keeping quality a priority as companies scale.

Linear launched a series of conversations with product leaders on how things of quality get built: ​“What is quality? It seems hard to describe and even harder to measure, but you can feel it when it’s there. You know it when you experience it.”

Christopher Butler wrote an essay on how details, focus, time, and taste elevate craft. ​“Attention to detail is not a personality trait; it is a manifestation of a preference for order and consistency. When that preference is fundamental, it makes it nearly impossible for a person to not see mistakes, flaws, inconsistencies, or differences. […] This is why attention to detail cannot (easily) be taught. Teaching a person to ​“see detail” requires them to care about and prefer certain forms of order.”

What I like about Linear is how clearly they define principles and ideas that drive their product decisions. You can either love or hate how opinionated they are, but that clarity is admirable. ​“At Linear we believe software can feel magical. Quality of software is driven by both the talent of its creators and how they feel while they’re crafting it. To bring back the right focus, these are the foundational and evolving ideas Linear is built on.”

Matthew Ström explores the concept of ​“polish” in design and its paradoxical nature by looking at a few examples. ​“The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must be an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning. The unseen effort to perfect every hidden aspect elevates products from good to great.”

Stripe puts their money where their mouth is. The new User Experience Assurance team is ​“focused on evaluating and improving user experiences across all of Stripe’s products. This team evaluates, measures, and tracks the experience quality of Stripe’s user journeys. You will work closely with product teams to ensure that Stripe products meet or exceed our high quality bar.”

A talk from Stripe’s Sessions 2024 conference on why well-crafted products are expressions of care and dedication — and how that correlates to business success. Head of Design Katie Dill kicks it off by talking about the value of quality and dispelling some of the myths and common-held beliefs about craft and beauty — that it is ​“in the eye of the beholder,” purely cosmetic, and at odds with growth. In Stripe’s experience, beauty is objective, functional, and support growth.

Later, she invites the cofounder and CEO of Linear, Karri Saarinen, and the CPO of Figma, Yuhki Yamashita, to share their thoughts on craft and beauty. I like Karri’s separation of these concepts — ​“craft is the mindset and activity you do, and the quality and beauty are the output.” You can also read the recap of this talk on the Figma blog.

I loved this article by Karri Saarinen from Linear on why redesigns are important and its sequel, ​“How we redesigned the Linear UI,” on tackling that kind of project. ​“This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product’s existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.”

On paying off the design debt: ​“While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual.”

On exploring the next version without considering practicality: ​“A secret I’ve learned is that when you tell people a design is a ​“concept” or ​“conceptual” it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That’s the power of visual design.”