KATIE DILL: Craft and beauty, nice to have. We'll get to it when we can. Has anybody heard that before? Maybe even said it? Yeah, I'll admit: I have, too. Sometimes, that may make sense. Think about the first production automobile, the Model T. The saying was, “You can have any color you want as long as it's black,” and I'm sure it wasn't easy to drive, definitely no power steering or power door locks, but it didn't matter because the competition was a horse.

But think about cars today. When you look at cars today, it's the leather, it's the stitching, it's the sound the door makes. All those little details that can add up to either make the car feel “meh”" or premium. It's because the quality in the details become the differentiation. When competition is high and expectations are high, that's where you have to distinguish, and craft and beauty isn't a nice-to-have, it's a must-have.

My name is Katie Dill, and I've been at Stripe for about three years. One of the reasons why I came is that meticulous craft is one of the operating principles. We do it because we think beautiful things are more enjoyable, it's better to be around. We do it because it's a matter of pride. We also do it because we build financial infrastructure, so businesses like yours rely on our tools to then be the foundation of the experiences that you create for your users.

So, it's got to be great. We don't always get it right, I know, and we are definitely in pursuit of learning how to be better at quality. We're students of quality, and along the way, we've found some of the common-held beliefs about quality are frankly just not true. So, I am excited today to try to dispel a few of those myths, and talk a little bit about the value of quality. So, myth number one: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This isn't exactly true.

While yes, there is no accounting for taste, for example, good luck telling my daughter that this does not match. I mean, Crocs and socks? Her mom's a designer. But, oh, well. The reality is there is a fair amount of objectivity in beauty. For example, blue is commonly cited as the most beautiful color. The circle is commonly cited as the most beautiful shape. And, of course, well-proportioned geometry throughout history takes the cake. In other words, there's continuity in what people find beautiful, suggesting it's more than subjectivity.

Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh have a fantastic book that I highly recommend called “Beauty.” In it, they do a really interesting study where they took two paintings—one that was a real Mondrian and one that was a fake. And they asked audiences around the globe if they could tell the real from the fake. I'm curious: in this room, which one do you think [is real]? Raise your hand if you think “A” is the masterpiece. Now, raise your hand if you think “B” is the masterpiece.

Well done, folks. Well done, and “A” is the answer. This was tested around the globe, and 85% of the people in the audience get it right. Is that because everybody is a Mondrian expert? Or is it because he got it right? He found a more objectively beautiful solution. We know from X-rays that he painstakingly moved the lines around to find just the right placement. And based on the number of hands that went up in this room for “A,” seems like he got it right.

So, next time your team is debating, “Does it really matter what the layout's like, or the color, or the type choices?” know that actually yes, there probably is an objectively more beautiful solution that your users will appreciate more. And why should you care to find a more beautiful solution? Well, I know some of us may think that beauty is just cosmetic, a superficial layer on top. Not in our experience. As Steve Jobs famously said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

We've seen the aesthetics contribute greatly to usability and engagement. Part of it is because things that are beautiful are perceived to work better. It's called the aesthetic-usability effect. But even beyond that, when something is more attractive, compelling, [and] understandable, people will know how to use it better and they'll get better outcomes from it. We saw this firsthand with our email redesign.

Our original email looked like this, meh. It is lacking hierarchy. It is not exactly clear what we're trying to tell you if you could read the words, and it was leaving our users a little bit confused about what the right next step was. So, we applied a little craft and beauty to it and improved the copy, improved the visuals, we improved how it felt along the journey from the different steps you took. And lo and behold, this attention to craft and beauty increased product conversion by 20%.

The improved language and aesthetics increased the usability of the email. But these aesthetic decisions are not just surface-level. Craft and beauty goes into every aspect of the journey. That email looked nice, but if it took somebody to a dead end, well then we've still failed. Every touch point requires that same commitment to craft and beauty, because it'll either add or subtract value in the whole history of the journey.

You could think about the different levels of a product's quality just like a house. There's the foundational level. So, that's like the infrastructure or the API design. And just like the structure of a foundation, if there's a crack in it, you feel that disconnect throughout the rest of the structure. And then, on the structural level, that's where the rooms are organized. The flow really matters, just like in your products design, your information architecture.

And then next is the functional layer. So, in a home that might be your doors and windows and essentially how things interact in your home. And then, of course, in your product, those will be your affordances and your buttons and your ways of engaging. And then, lastly, of course, the cosmetic layer. The paint on top or in your product, the surface, the typography, and the choices of the aesthetics.

Craft and beauty matters at every level because they're all connected. And of course that architectural design, or that construction or that plumbing will show up in how the door swings or the paint lays smooth. These details will connect. And I can speak from personal experience because my house is leaking through all of the windows, that if craft is lacking underneath, it will seep out eventually.

The multidimensional character of building for craft and beauty means that it's not just one team's job to get it right: it's the whole company contributes to building something with craft and beauty because so many aspects connect. It's a cultural thing. One way this plays out at Stripe can be seen in our method of friction logging. So, what happens is we have multidisciplinary teams like engineers, product managers, and designers do what we call “walking the store.”

And so, they use the product just like a user would, end-to-end across various surfaces in moments in time to really experience the quality firsthand. And in doing so, it becomes loud and clear how much the quality matters at every step of the way, and that it is not just on the surface. Now, this leads me to our last myth. The assumption is that you can either build features fast or make them beautiful.

That beauty might be at odds with growth. In our experience, that just isn't true. There's always a third option, one that is functional and beautiful. And as I said earlier, beauty enhances functionality. We've seen this in practice in our checkout product. Every hour, two million people checkout through Stripe. And over the years, we have fine-tuned every last detail of this flow to try to make it better for the consumers moving through this process.

We make it faster and easier for them to execute on what they're trying to do, and this in hand increases conversion for the merchant. Now, because we have been able to do that, we have also been able to help businesses grow. This improved flow increases revenue by 11.9% and that's because we've made changes in brevity, we've made changes in the affordances, we've introduced dynamic payment methods, and a one-click checkout with Link.

These improvements make the customer experience better, which increases conversion. In other words, craft and beauty can drive growth. For growing businesses in a competitive environment, these myths are simply not true. Your customer may not say, “I must have more beauty.” Their primary concern is the utility. But the features are all for naught if they're not also usable, and they're certainly not enough if they're not also enjoyable, delightful. In our experience, there's objectivity in beauty.

Well-crafted beautiful things are more functional, and beautiful things support growth. It's not a nice-to-have—it's a must-have. And while searching for that third option can be really challenging... really challenging, we believe it's important to growth and a matter of pride. And, frankly, it's just a lot more fun and enjoyable to be around beautiful things.

We are on a journey at Stripe to get better at craft and beauty. We're always eager to learn from others and that's why I am excited to chat with Karri, CEO and cofounder of Linear, and Yuhki, chief product officer of Figma, to hear their views on craft and beauty. We're admirers of their work and are excited to learn from them too. Welcome Karri and Yuhki to the stage.

Thanks for being here, fellas. So, I'm very excited to hear from you, and also I want you to feel fully comfortable to tell everybody that everything I just said is wrong if you disagree. But anyway, let's dig in. So, at Stripe we use the phrase “craft and beauty,” as you just heard me say many, many times. We talk about that to denote the differences in types of quality. I'm curious if these concepts resonate and if these are things that you talk about in your companies. Karri, do you want to go first?

KARRI SAARINEN: Yeah, for sure. I mean, beauty and quality has always been the initial and core values of Linear. So, it's always been, for me personally and for us founders something that, like, why do something if you don't do it well? But like on the craft and beauty, I like to separate those concepts a little bit in a way that I think the craft is more like the mindset and the activity you do, and the quality or the beauty is the output. So, like, craft, usually if you think about anything well done in this world that is designed or built, I think, usually, it means that someone put the craft in it.

Like, in your case, in your house, someone didn't put it in. That caused a problem.

KATIE DILL: Yeah.

KARRI SAARINEN: But if you have a really good person doing that, they will not do that mistake. So, obviously, people can make mistakes but they take more care of avoiding those mistakes. So, it's kind of like a mindset of how do you approach what you're doing? Do you care about the quality of the output or not? Or are you just completing a job quickly because that's what is required from you? But I think we are in a business of building products and selling them, and I think it's our responsibility to try to do a good work.

So, in the end, I think that the quality or the beauty matters, and then it's the output that comes from the craft. But the craft is not enough if you don't have the skills or the right ideas or the right direction. There can be a lot of things where someone can take a hobby and they start crafting things. It doesn't mean that they're good at it, like they make the best tables or something. It still needs that person to do it.

And then, the last thing I would say, to me… I will today talk more about quality because I think that beauty is kind of like included in it. To me, the quality of the experience is everything you kind of like... With your house or with whatever product, what you experience, and the beauty is one of the things you experience. But it's also, does the window open well? Is it quiet? And these kind[s] of things. I like to talk more about quality than beauty on its own.

KATIE DILL: Yuhki, what do you think?

YUHKI YAMASHITA: Yeah, for me, your metaphor of the house really resonated because we think about it in that same way of kind of a hierarchy of needs. If you think about the origin story of Figma, a lot of it was convincing people that you can have a native-like experience on the web, and as part of that, performance and frame rate are things that we care so much about. And I think Dylan, our CEO, is one of the few CEOs who would come in and say, “I think the frame rate dropped on that interaction, it's not 60 frames per second anymore.”

But those things are really important because without that you don't get to experience all the other wonderful things that you're building on it. So, from that perspective, I think that foundation is really important and being bug-free and all those things are kind of table stakes. And then kind of layering on top of that things that, to Karri's point, I totally agree that craft is something that is kind of like a cultural thing of you just caring and deciding to care and a user might, you know, if they choose to inspect, see how thoughtful the experience is.

And then, I think there's a layer of like, you don't even… it's just so intuitive that, you know, like, you feel everything is just working and it just works for you. And that's kind of like one aspiration, and there's another where it's just, if someone chose to analyze it, they can really appreciate how much thought went into it. And those are things that you only go for if you actually care about as a culture.

KATIE DILL: Yeah, that's an excellent point. Sometimes, yes, what you demonstrate through that work and that care actually says a lot, and it helps people also know what went into it behind the scenes perhaps, and it also helps to build trust for what's happening and things that they can't see.

YUKHI YAMASHITA: Right.

KATIE DILL: Great points, fellas. I know a question we get asked a lot is about measurement of the impact of craft and beauty. In your product or business, have you seen that done well?

YUHKI YAMASHITA: Yeah, I mean, I think if you really unpack why people are asking about this, there's a few questions inside of it. There's kind of like, How do we measure quality in the first place? And then, given that you've measured it, how do you show the impact of it?, which are distinct things.

KATIE DILL: Yeah.

YUKHI YAMASHITA: I think, how do you measure quality or a really great experience is a really existential problem in and of itself. And I'm sure one story I think of is when I was working at Uber, and I'm sure you'd appreciate this as someone who worked at Lyft, is we always kind of debated, “What is that perfect pickup experience?” And we would say, “Well, maybe it's a pickup where there was no contact, or you didn't have to wait much,"” or things like that.

And then, over time, one of the things we realized is we actually have to have a separate roadmap to actually try to measure it better. And over time, started to realize that actually a phone call could help make a pickup feel better, even though it's nice to say a magic experience is one where you didn't have to contact the driver at all.

Actually, we noticed when we asked users in situ that phone calls can help, or texts can help make it better. And so, I think those are things that change your perspective on what a good experience is and it's something you have to constantly try to measure. But I think the other side of it, given that you've measured it, how do you actually show the impact? And I think this one-- I go back to something that one of my friends, Madhu, who's the Chief Product Officer at Chime, in his time at Robinhood and other places, kind of came up with this idea that, you know, I think we can all agree that a great experience or a magical experience leads to people wanting to use your product more, engage with the product more, and then that is good for a business. That just makes logical sense, and it's just that, as you go further up the chain, it becomes more and more measurable.

And so, of course, we can measure kind of impact to revenue or AR or whatever you're measuring on the business side, of course we can measure engagement. And it's just this, like, “Does the user love it?” That's the thing that's kind of fuzzy, but despite being fuzzy, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't therefore go on it.

And so, I think, you just kind of have to accept that it's a little bit…. it can be more approximate.

KATIE DILL: Yeah.

YUHKI YAMASHITA: But it's okay so long as you agree that those are things that lead to each other, basically.

KATIE DILL: Excellent point.

KARRI SAARINEN: Yeah, I agree with a lot of points and I would say, kind of what Yuhki was saying, I don't think there's a single measure you can measure, Like there's this quality measure and it's only one, it's a single metric you can measure. It's probably a lot of different things and then also it depends on the company or product what are those things that can indicate there's good quality. But in the end, I think it's more like a feeling that you just have to believe in it. First, you need to believe that quality does matter and it's beneficial to the company and to the business. And then, you need to look into signals. Then, you have to encourage the teams to actually do that.

A lot of companies don't actually encourage their people to do anything in quality because what they say is… they talk about deadlines, they talk about all kinds of other incentives but never about, “Is the experience good or is the quality part there?“ And, if you operate your company this way, it's not a surprise that the quality doesn't happen because no one was talking about it. So, it's a like a cultural thing, you need to remind people that we do value quality. And then, you try to make it happen.

And then, the third thing is you try to validate in different ways, “Is this actually happening?” “Are the users actually loving the product?“ Maybe it's one of those ways that Yuhki mentioned, like measuring certain things. But I think, for us, it's always been more anecdotal that, uhm, companies... like a Linear product that users use every day and they do a lot of things in there. So, we hear a lot of feedback from people and they send emails to our support. Like, “Hey I really love the product.“ Or like, “I really love this new feature you added.“

People talk about, tweet about it. And sometimes the CEOs or founders who buy Linear, they say they buy it partly because the product experience is so good, so they want to inspire their teams. So, you hear these kind of things and you can then tell yourself, “It's okay, we are kind of doing it.“ But you have to listen to the signals and talk to people to [try] to validate if the quality is there. And I would say it's like... I think if people are not raving about your product, you probably don't have a good product. You maybe have a okay product, but if people are not organically talking about how good your product is, you probably don't have a good product.

Great products create fans and champions and those people will talk about it. And then the last thing I would say, I think the product quality is the ultimate mode for a business. It's kind of hard to see a situation where a worse product comes [into] a market. Like, you're successful and a worse product comes on a market and there's some hope. I think if you have a really good product, you can retain those customers, you build loyalty with them with the experience. So, I think, to me, the product quality is one of those like modes that you can have as a business. Those are some of the things I think [about].

Katie Dill: That is awesome. And I would say, I would build on that to say that it's not something you can rest on your laurels about either, which you have demonstrated in both of your companies as you continue to innovate and build and improve on it, because you can see a great company be surpassed when others come around. I also like the point that there are a number of things that need to be looked at to measure quality. At Stripe, I think there [are] three things: There's the talk[ing] to users through user research, [which] is paramount, right?

We have to understand our assumptions aren't always correct. Then, there's the “let's look at the data and let's measure different things,” because for some products that we have, for example, it might be about how fast you get through. For some products, it might be how much time you spend, it might differ depending on the product. And then, I think also to your point, it's also about the people's internal impression.

You try to hire the best in the world and if they believe that what they're making is right, if they take pride in it, it's probably a pretty good sign. If they don't, then [you’ve] got issues. Okay, on the flip side, when does it not make sense to prioritize quality?

Yuhki Yamashita: Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on how you define quality, but in our collective definition, I think it always makes sense and it's just that the common mistake is applying it the wrong altitude. So, for example, we're going through some questions today about some experiences that feel broken in Figma, and one of the things we always debate is “is this solution solving the symptom or the problem, or the root cause?“ And I think you can apply a lot of beauty and craft to a surface-level problem, a surface-level solution, but you still feel the underlying issue. So, I think that's the thing that we try to watch out for.

KARRI SAARINEN: Yeah, kind of like I would say, if you had unlimited resources and time, probably it always would make sense to always do quality. I don't think there's a situation where it would make things worse. But I think the reality is many companies and maybe most companies, you don't have unlimited amount of resources or focus or energy or something. So, you have to pick and choose. So, I think it depends on your business. What I would say is you should apply the quality on the main thing, on what the main thing of the business. And maybe it's often the product, but even in the product there's probably areas that are more primary than others.

So, if you have to compromise on something, you should make sure that you don't compromise on the main thing, but you can compromise on other things. So, I know, for example, at Linear, we always feel the product should be really good, but for example, initially, we didn't spend a lot of time building the help center or something because at that point it wasn't that important and we just needed to get something out that could be useful for people.

But since then, we've been fixing it. But it's always, “What's the level of effort you put in and does the quality actually matter?” “How much does it actually matter for the customer or the user?” So, I think you have to make some trade-offs or compromises sometimes.

KATIE DILL: And how do you know? How did you make that choice of where it's gonna make the most difference for the user?

KARRI SAARINEN: Yeah, I think it's mostly just intuitive choice in a way that you just have to believe, again, what is your business about and why this product exists or how and why people use it. And I think there's some things, once the product is out there or your business is out there, you start seeing more what are actually the important bits. It's probably the bits that you hear more about and what people use more. So, I think that's an indication, those are the areas you should focus more and then there's areas that maybe you can focus less.

KATIE DILL: Right, that actually gets me to the next point. One of the things that the three of us have in common is that our businesses create products for other businesses, in addition to consumers. Curious what your thoughts are on how craft and beauty considerations vary when you're thinking in terms of designing for businesses or designing for other consumers?

Yuhki Yamashita: Yeah, I think that on one hand, I think the trend is that people are bringing their consumer-level expectations to the workplace and that, you know, maybe in the past there was this narrative of experiences that matter so much in a B2B tool or in the kind of tools that are used in businesses, because you can just secure these long-term contracts and the buyer is different from the user, etc. But I think in both Linear's case and Figma's case for sure, we just saw our community really pick up a tool and then bring it bottoms up, in which case it really does matter.

So, I think the distinction is getting kind of thinner. That being said, I do think there's some things in the workplace that you might care a little bit more about, like getting stuff done, efficiency, and showing the impact of that, or maybe a little bit less appetite for arbitrary novelty and stuff like that. But I am more of the belief that there's a convergence rather than divergence.

KARRI SAARINEN: Yeah, and I agree, in, for example, iPhone's case, how it became the “business phone,” though initially it wasn't. But it's like people had the expectations, like, “My business tools should be as good as my [personal phone]—they shouldn't be worse than my personal tools.” If anything, they should be better.

Yuhki Yamashita: Yeah.

KARRI SAARINEN: So, that's my view, too. I think, on a consumer side, there [are] different market dynamics at play where sometimes it can be that a trend or something like, for example, Stanley cups are more popular at some point, and then some other container is more popular at some point. It has nothing to do with the product itself necessarily. It's more about what is the perception on the market, what products are cool and whatnot. Versus, I think, there [are] a lot of tools and appliances they sell as professional-grade appliances.

And usually what it means is that they're more durable, more powerful, they use better materials. In some ways they're more simple or focused tools like a dishwasher for a restaurant, it's simpler but it's also faster because that's what restaurants want. So, I think there should be this idea of professional quality software, too, whereas the tools or the software used at your company should be better than anything else out there.

And I think there [are] a lot of reasons for that. And I think, just briefly, I think the main reason is that companies, most software companies are SaaS companies so you want to retain the customers. And the way to lose customers is if your product doesn't work and it works bad. And then, a way to retain customers is the product works really well. So, I think there's a lot of reasons why you should put more effort into the professional tools.

KATIE DILL: Absolutely, excellent points. I think, unfortunately, B2B design, I think it's a bad name oftentimes because the person buying the product might not be the person using it. But I think Figma has done an excellent job in going directly to the users who become the champions of it. Same thing with Linear, as you said: people talk about the quality of your products, people invite you to panels to talk about the quality of your products because you have done that and they are excited to use it every day in the workplace, including myself.

All right, last question because I see the time here. In conclusion, what three things would you recommend that every team do to get better at craft and beauty in their own companies?

KARRI SAARINEN: I mean, I think it's probably summarizing a lot of things we already said. So, I think there's, first of all, it's just the belief. If you are like a leader or a founder of a company, first thing is do you actually believe in quality? And sometimes people don't and maybe that's okay, but a lot of people do. So, I think you should first share that belief with others and then try to build the teams and hire people that agree with that and kind of like are the craftspeople. Try to encourage that, celebrate things done well.

Show other companies that have good examples. Always try to just encourage that because I think that the problem is that quality doesn't happen on its own. Someone needs to put the thoughtfulness and work in it. So, that's why you need to always push for it. It doesn't happen naturally.

YUKHI YAMASHITA: Yeah, I think, for me, totally agree. The first thing is definitely the people and talent. If you need an OKR to convince someone to care about quality, you probably have the wrong team and you want to find people who just care inherently, right? I think the second is maybe making some space for it. Sometimes we need to zoom out of our every day to just allow people to really go deep in their crafts. That's why there [are] hack weeks or we have maker weeks in which people can do that. And sometimes the pressure of every day doesn't allow you to think about those things. And then, the third thing is something we mentioned earlier, which is just because you can't measure it precisely doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. So, yeah.

KATIE DILL: Awesome. Thank you both for being here. Really appreciate it. Feel like this was a wonderful compliment to the big idea that there is a lot of value in craft and beauty, but I think as you both said, one, there's a lot of levels to it. There's a lot of aspects to it. Everything from how fast a page loads to how well the page feels. I think you really put on a good point about that. Sometimes, it's about [being] intuitive. You don't necessarily have to measure it to know that it's a value, but that there are many ways that you can go about bringing it to your team and making sure that folks know it's important, one of which is hiring people that believe in that too. Thank you for sharing all this. Thank you all for being here. I hope you got something useful that you can take back to your team. Take care.

YUHKI YAMASHITA: Thank you.