why quality matters
On a Saturday night, I found out about Linear. By 12 am Sunday, I was deep in a rabbit hole, reading everything I could find about Linear. On Monday night, I was writing this.
One thing stuck with me, though: their ‘Conversations on Quality’ video series. I really liked the episode with Linear’s CEO, Karri Saarinen. He talked about how the team ensures a high bar for quality.
I got into tech during the era of “move fast and break things”. For a while, that mantra worked. Stay scrappy, ship fast, and smooth out the details later. Speed was the unwritten rule.
Now, with AI-assisted development, this culture lives on.
Every day, new products are shipped with little care for quality, safety, or the actual user experience. The routine is the same: vibe-code an AI agent over the weekend, launch it on Monday, get millions of users on it, and disappear in two months when users pick up the next shiny toy.
On caring about quality
Linear stood out to me because they had this quiet, stubborn belief in putting out the best quality version of anything they create.
“We believe that you should do things well, and it’s not worth doing them badly. And it’s really annoying for us when we see things done badly.” - Karri Saarinen, Linear’s CEO.
With most companies mindlessly adopting AI into their product strategy, or in a rat race to ship first and fast, it’s rare to see companies that focus on quality. Who care deeply about how their product solves customers’ needs, if it's marketed intentionally, and if in-product interactions are carefully thought through.
Software that people actually want to use and feel great to use.
Companies like Linear are talking about ensuring quality with your craft and doing the actual work to craft quality that endures.
Quality matters in everything. It’s why Hayao Miyazaki is my favourite Japanese animator. I stumbled on a YouTube video that introduced me to Studio Ghibli's animated films, and it drew me into this world he created, where he cared about animating the teardrops on a kid’s face to the sound of raindrops on a roof. The storytelling felt intentional. The world-building, the choice of soundtrack, and even the clouds showed that he cared about the audience experience with his films.
With well-crafted things like Studio Ghibli’s films, it comes with a feeling that makes you feel alive.
Another example is how K-dramas are told with so much care, from the smallest reaction in the acting to the story’s pacing. Nothing is out of place; it all feels right, even when words are said with just their eyes.
It’s often said that ‘good marketing can’t fix a bad product’ or, if I might add, ‘fix a bad user experience’. If you don’t care enough about how your product is built or how the onboarding experience is for users, then a huge marketing budget can only do so much. Think of Paystack, the Payments company; everything from their marketing to the product experience and customer support feels delightful. It feels like someone stayed up late thinking, “How can I make this kinder, smoother, and better?”
North-star metrics for quality
To build things of quality, you need to:
Care about your craft
Technology has made it faster than ever to build, but harder to care. And the true measure of quality is how you care about your craft. To build for quality, you need to care about what you’re building and who you’re building for, especially when no one is watching.
In his Config 2025 keynote, Karri Saarinen said something that knocked my socks off:
“We replaced metrics with purpose. We stopped asking the question, ‘Does this feel right?’ and started asking, ‘Does this convert?’
We have moved away from building stuff that feels right for you and everyone to what feels normal, like everything else.
To build for quality, you have to take pride in your work and push yourself to make things that are the best possible version of them.
Be obsessive
Quality needs a little obsession. You have to be obsessive enough to pay attention to the tiny details that most people wouldn’t consciously notice, but definitely feel. You have to think in this parallel: how can I fix a tiny bug to make my app load a little faster, correct a small subtitle typo before sharing a product launch video, or speak to customers directly before I build a new feature?
For her first studio album, Billie Eilish obsessed over everything, from the lyrics to the chord progression to how she wanted the music video to be shot. Watching her documentary, The World’s a Little Blurry, made me realize that she believed the music she was making mattered, and making stuff of quality was the only way to win. She went on to win six Grammys for her album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go.
Take your time
Building with quality needs time. Usually, time when it matters. It’s better to go slow and expensive than go fast and cheap. If you’re choosing to build for the long-term value over short-lived trends, you have to be willing to move more slowly so you can make something that actually lasts. You need to think about the long-term value, build something that outlives you, and make things that you’re proud to put your name on.
Hayao Miyazaki shows this well. For the studio’s 2013 film, The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki insisted that a particular scene should be hand-drawn without using any CGI effects. This 4-second scene of a crowd of people moving through each other took animator Eiji Yamamori 15 months to complete.
At 24 frames per second, a total of 96 images, 6.4 images per month, were hand-drawn and painted with watercolour. Each character in the crowd had their own personality and motivations reflected through their unique movements, and everything blended into a beautifully coordinated yet chaotic sea of people.
Quality is a choice. And building for quality isn’t always glamorous; it’s hard, messy, and back-breaking work, but the output always feels just right.
Leave perfection behind
Quality doesn’t mean perfection. Done is always better than perfect. You’re allowed to make mistakes, not stay stuck chasing perfection and never get things off the ground. Quality means that you don’t treat what you’re building as disposable. It means that you ship, you ask questions, you learn something new, you iterate, but you never stop caring.
The world is evolving, and technology is changing overnight. So, everyone - from builders to storytellers - needs to spend some time interrogating our motivations for whatever we are creating. And stop to ask ourselves if we want to continue adding to the slop or build good things for the world. Something that makes the world a little bit better, instead of just louder, adding to the noise.
I leave you with this: In a time when you can build anything, choose to build something of quality.