Most of us want to do great work. Building things of exceptional quality – work that’s beautiful, lovable, fast – is one of life’s great joys.
However, the story goes, capitalism doesn’t value quality. Businesses don’t fund software that is lovable. Thus, you need to make a career choice: do you want to be a craftsperson, or do you want to make money?
This dichotomy is nonsense.
I mean, yes, these two things are in some tension. You can easily make money maintaining EOL plumbing if you can motivate yourself to do it well, and you can easily make beautiful products if you can afford to give them away for peanuts.
But there absolutely exist businesses that are very large and successful in part because they invest in quality. Beauty, speed, and user experience can drive profits.
Patrick Collison spoke about this back in 2023:
My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things, and for rational reasons. Because what does a beautiful thing tell you?
Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared. And you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only care about those and did everything else in a very slapdash way. …
If someone really convinced me that the financial returns to craftsmanship and beauty – which I believe are greater – are not greater, I’d still do it. Life’s too short.
So you could try working at Stripe.
Even within Stripe, however, there are products and areas that don’t justify the level of care Patrick describes here. To get a real mandate for quality – to do great work, and earn a good income doing it – you need to ask yourself a question: is there a business case for quality here?
If you want the resources necessary to build something well, then choose to work on things worth doing well.
Things Worth Doing Well
There are a lot of reasons a product could be worth doing exceptionally well. Here are some:
- The product is used often – by many people, many times a week
- The motion is product-led – people self-serve, and refer by word of mouth
- The focus is retention – customers will vote with their feet
- The customers have high LTV – each buyer could grow into a huge account
- The buyers are users – quality impacts the decision-makers themselves
- The users are demanding – developers, designers, and other prosumers
There are many others, but even just the above attributes describe some of the most craft-centric companies out there: Linear, Figma, Stripe, Wealthsimple, Apple, and so on. The economic details vary, but if a large company is spending the surprisingly large amount of resources it takes to build exceptional products, there’s a business reason to do so.
Meanwhile, many of the most slapdash products out there are the inverse of this dynamic: imagine an internal control panel that an enterprise contract obliges you to deliver. A project like that shouldn’t be laboured over – it should be built to a minimum reasonable standard, then shipped. Its primary success factor is to exist.
So if your goal is to work on things that are worth doing well, how do you figure that out a priori? You need to get a sense of the business. Who are the customers, what makes them buy, and what makes them stick around? If you want to build a company that can justify making great stuff, ensure that you’re in a market where quality can confer an advantage.
The analysis is a bit easier if you’re being recruited, since you can simply ask.
Back when I ran Steamclock, occasionally I’d be approached by a prospective client that wanted to make a delightful app (excellent, that’s what Steamclock is all about) but for a use case that seemed… peripheral. Maybe it was an occasional-use product, or perhaps it was an internal tool.
Sometimes it was plainly obvious that hiring an A-Team for the project was overkill, but other times, I’d explicitly ask:
Thinking about what success looks like, how much do UX and quality for this product contribute to the success of the business overall?
Sometimes they’d quickly realize it was a bad fit. But other times, they’d make a compelling economic case for craft and UX – starting us off on the right foot to execute on that vision.
At the end of the day, there are countless ways to make a career building great software. The important thing to remember is that it’s not enough to care deeply about craft. It’s a great start, but if your customers won’t actually reward quality, you’ll be running uphill.
Instead, work on products that have a business case for craft. You’ll have a durable mandate to do great work – and make money doing it.