Decentralizing quality

"When it comes to software, we like to pretend that quality is a number. Dashboards stand in for judgment, A/B tests stand in for taste, and leaders try to will excellence into existence with reviews and mandates. But in today's software market, confusing a KPI with quality isn't just naive; it's fatal. Consumers' attention spans are short, but their expectations are higher than ever; if your product fails to solve a real problem in an elegant way, you don't get a second chance."

"But more and more I've come to believe that quality isn't a slogan, a program, or a scorecard. It's a promise kept at the edge by the people doing the work. And, ideally, quality is fundamental to the product itself, where users can judge it without our permission. That's the shift we need: away from heroics at the center, toward systems that make quality inevitable."

"In my time at Stripe, the pursuit of quality was nearly obsessive: 99.999% uptime (about five minutes of downtime a year) was the bare minimum. On the user experience side, we created a program to standardize and report on quality across every product team in the company. Last year, Malthe Sigurdsson (who led design at Stripe from 20152020) rejoined as Head of Craft to drive quality across design."

Quality in software is frequently reduced to metrics such as dashboards, A/B tests, and KPIs, which can mask the nuanced judgments required for excellence. Consumers have short attention spans and high expectations; products that fail to solve real problems elegantly lose users quickly. Some companies build brand value around quality, and organizations like Stripe pursued extreme reliability and company-wide quality reporting. Centralized slogans, programs, and mandates can produce results but are brittle. Decentralized approaches—continuous feedback, distributed ownership, and emergent standards—create resilience. Quality should be a promise kept at the product edge and inherently visible to users without managerial permission.

Read at matthewstrom.com