Why craft and beauty drive growth, not just polish

In a crowded market, design quality stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a competitive lever. That was the core argument from a panel at Stripe’s 2024 conference featuring Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear; Yuhki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma; and Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe.

Dill framed the issue bluntly: “The quality and details become the differentiation.” She noted that Stripe’s investment in the Optimized Checkout Suite — an area where attention to detail is direct — helped businesses using it see 11.9% more revenue on average. That result, she argued, stems from the aesthetic usability effect: beautiful products are perceived to work better, which drives engagement and comprehension.

Craft as mindset, beauty as output

Saarinen draws a deliberate line between the two terms. Craft is the mindset — the decision to care about the quality of what you ship, versus just completing a task quickly. Beauty is what users experience, but it sits within a broader definition of quality. He offered a home metaphor: a window that opens smoothly and a room that is quiet are qualities that matter as much as aesthetics.

At Figma, Yamashita described the approach as a hierarchy of needs. Performance and frame rate are the foundation; the company’s CEO, Dylan Field, is known for flagging when an interaction drops below 60 frames per second. Without that baseline, the higher-level attributes of the product never get a chance to shine.

Above that, craft becomes a cultural issue. “A user might really see how thoughtful the experience is if they choose to look closely, but there’s a version where it’s so intuitive that you feel like everything just works,” Yamashita said. He was dismissive of bureaucratic incentives for quality: “If you need an OKR to convince someone to care about quality, you probably have the wrong team.”

Quality as an end-to-end practice

Dill emphasized that delivering crafted experiences is not the sole job of a design team. At Stripe, this plays out through friction logging. Multidisciplinary teams — engineers, product managers, and designers — “walk the store” by using the product as a user would, across surfaces and journeys. The goal is to experience quality firsthand, seeing how it works rather than only how it looks.

She pointed to an email redesign as evidence of the link between polish and conversion. The original email lacked hierarchy, which left users unsure of their next step. After improving the copy, visuals, and journey flow, the team saw product conversion from that email series rise by 20%. Her conclusion: every touchpoint either adds or subtracts value, so each one needs the same commitment to craft.

That reasoning extends to measuring quality, which Yamashita admitted is thorny. He distinguished between two problems: how to measure quality, and how to show its impact. The first is an existential question — at Uber, teams debated what the perfect pickup experience was, and user research revealed that contact between driver and rider, once seen as a failure, actually improved the experience.

The second problem is showing impact. Revenue and engagement metrics help, but some of the most meaningful signals are softer. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of whether a user loves it,” he said. “Despite it being fuzzy, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t goal on it. We have to accept that this kind of measurement can be more approximate.”

The product quality moat

Saarinen argued that no single metric captures quality. It varies by product and company; ultimately, it is a feeling. Teams first need to believe quality matters for the business, then they need permission to prioritize it. He noted that companies talk about deadlines and incentives, but rarely ask whether the experience is good or whether the quality bar is being met.

For Linear, validation often comes anecdotally. Users email support to praise new features, tweet about the product, and founders say they buy it because of the experience. That kind of advocacy is the real signal. “If people are not raving about your product, then you probably don’t have a good product,” Saarinen said. “Great products create fans and champions, and those people will talk about it. Product quality is the ultimate moat for a business.”