An aspect that you are accountable as a design leader is ensuring that the team is shipping work at high quality.

What is quality? The team at Linear had written about this and I'd be hard pressed to add anything more to this.

It is difficult to describe quality in words and is impossible to measure it in numbers, but you can feel it when it's there. You know it when you experience it. - Linear

What are the ingredients you need to ship at high quality?

Now, in order to bring a change - we need to look at the designers work (nature) and the environment in which design happens (nurture)

A few interventions that I've introduced at the environment level in order to create a culture of quality:

• A design process that acts as a baseline to produce quality outcomes.

• Design principles to guide the team (including engineers and PMs) about what a good solution looks like.

• Peer reviews to enable people to refine their solutions early on.

• A strong design system

However, I consider all of these to be baseline measures. While process is a great proxy to enable people to produce results with some consistency, the important factor here is the person who is applying the process.

It is the people who need to bring exceptional craftsmanship to the table in order to raise the bar in quality. Without the right people, all of the above measures at achieving quality remain at the baseline!

The critical ingredient in people to create work of high quality is CARE. Care for the users we serve and Care for the product that they interact with.

Care for the user

This care comes from Understanding of users' workflow. Anticipating users' needs and creating solutions leading to delight. As designers we equate this as user empathy.

Care for the product

For a designer, this is where taste comes into picture. This is about not being content with the current state and constantly refining one's taste based on what is being done in other places. Quality comes from sensitivity towards the craft.

A few examples of care for the product demonstrated at Appsmith:

Syntax highlighting of code

Building razor-sharp icons aligning to the pixel grid.

Removing anti-aliasing on the text to improve text rendering

Nobody says that these are important or these will move a business metric. We do these because we know what good looks like.

It is important to hire for this attribute. While not everyone in your team might be operating at a high level of taste - having atleast one person can make a difference. Making this person to talk about their watchfulness and articulating taste slowly percolates to others.

Without this care or sensitivity for taste, quality is very hard to achieve.