Building Quality Products
Lessons from a new wave of B2B software companies
"Most B2B startups have too good quality." When a B2B founder told me this recently, my gut screamed no way. But the thought was intriguing. It raised some interesting questions: What makes a product truly high quality, and importantly, does that quality even matter?
Let me be clear upfront: I'm suspicious of product-building playbooks. They're usually too biased, trying to extrapolate universal truths from single successes. Instead, we should ask: What patterns emerge when we study multiple successful companies?
That's why Linear's "Conversations on Quality" series is such a goldmine. Since last year, they've released nine episodes featuring builders from product-driven companies. The interviewees are well-known product leaders from companies generally considered for their craft and quality:
Dick Costolo, Co-Founder at 01 Advisors and former Twitter CEO
Karri Saarinen, Linear's CEO
Jeff Weinstein, Product Lead at Stripe
Henry Modisett, Head of Design at Perplexity
Tara Feener, Product Engineering Manager at The Browser Company
Ethan Eismann, SVP Design at Slack
I've watched and analyzed every episode. Here's what I learned.
A New Wave of Product Builders
There are fundamental shifts happening in how we build software.
A new cohort of builders is emerging, starting with Figma and continuing with newer companies like Linear, Attio, or The Browser Company. They share a more cohesive understanding of product – one that doesn't separate product and design but integrates them into a unified vision.
This shift brings two major changes:
Enterprise software is being built to be as high-quality as possible, aiming to get the job done and make work feel fantastic.
While user expectations were already rising earlier, the change is now driven by an increasing number of leaders passionate about craft.
The DNA of Great Product Founders
"What are all the things people will ask for and we won't do."
Great product founders share a crystal-clear vision of how their product will look and feel. Their superpower: Knowing what to say no to.
These founders are opinionated. They have a strong intuition about what 'good' looks like and have a certain taste in the product experience. Many mistake this for innate talent. It's a learnable skill. As Karri puts it: "This isn't some magical force you either have or don't have. It's just your brain telling you something based on your experience."
Their approach to user research is equally distinctive. Given that strong product founders have specific POVs and opinions, which determine what the product is, there is less emphasis on foundational research. Talking (and continuing to talk) to the customers mainly helps product founders keep their intuition in check.
Most importantly, they don't focus on asking what users want. Linear's early research focused on a single question: Would the product resonate with people, even if they didn't build everything users requested? This distinction matters enormously.
Great product founders challenge assumptions. They struggle to accept standard best practices and make their teams build their company with first principles in mind. Anecdotally, this especially applies to functions like HR (and might explain, for example, the aversion to standard 1-1s).
Defining Quality
Product quality, like product-market fit, is hard to measure but easy to spot.
The difference between good and great products? A deep user understanding that enables creating workflows like the users want them to be. But the inherent quality is not easily measurable. You can measure some aspects (like correctness, availability, performance, stability), but the key question is: "Are we seeing signals that people believe that we're doing quality stuff?"
Beyond solving a problem, there is a function of craft and beauty: make something that completely solves their problem, and feels great to use (in day-to-day usage). Slack's Ethan Eismann breaks quality into three dimensions:
Utility: Does it provide real value?
Usability: Is it the most intuitive possible experience?
Craft: Is it built with excellence?
It’s easy for me to see if people truly care about their product. Even untrained users subconsciously pick up on attention to detail.
But that craft might be a waste of energy: No amount of polish saves a product that doesn't solve a big enough problem. Jeff Weinstein always goes back to ask "What problems are so pressing that customers would cancel their entire day to solve them?"
This is where positioning and segmentation become critical early on. The narrower your focus on a core problem, the easier it becomes to build something great. Be very clear about what the product is for and who it is for.
The Business Case for Quality
Consumer VCs like to make light of the Founders Fund mantra ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ For those of us working in the enterprise, it’s actually the reverse, “They promised us 140 characters, instead we got Workday.”
Since few B2B businesses focus on quality, it can become a powerful differentiator.
It can also dramatically impact adoption because of the aesthetic-usability effect, especially with new technologies. Discovered first by Kurosu and Kashimura at Hitachi in 1995, their study showed that people also associate well-designed products with something that will work – regardless of actual functionality. While this effect primarily works on first impressions (not on retention), it's particularly powerful in today's noisy market.
This dynamic plays out most strongly in enterprise software. Despite over a decade of talk about the "consumerization of SaaS" (Box’s Aaron Levie wrote about this on TechCrunch back in 2011), B2B tools still often lag in quality. Leading VC funds still look actively to fund challengers in existing spaces where they believe the NPS (as an indicator) can be improved drastically. Companies are switching to well-crafted apps because the functionality (they actually use) is similar, but the experience is much better.
If you’re unsure how important quality will be in your space, it helps to visualize where you’re plotting against two key questions:
How painful is the problem you’re solving?
Are the alternatives already quite good?
How the Best Product Teams Operate
“It is not an accident why most B2B software is such crap. It is horrible. And of course the ones that really stand out, they usually are not this way. Don't get me wrong, there's companies like Oracle that are massively valuable driven with a sales-driven product. But Oracle, do you really want to be Oracle? I mean, does anybody like those products out there? I don't know. I'm not sure I've ever met anybody that didn't hate those products."
- Marty Cagan on Lenny’s Podcast
What do the best product teams have in common in how they operate? They share three critical elements: (1) Founder alignment, (2) quality-first hiring, and (3) preference for small teams.
Founder Alignment
Unsurprisingly, everything starts with the founders. Founders must agree that prioritizing quality matters, then hire people who share that conviction. Finally, they must create structures that enable quality.
This is harder than it sounds. Different founder backgrounds create different quality definitions and trade-offs. I observe founders often not on the same page in the first place.
Technical teams might have an advantage here — look at the sample of Linear (1 designer, 2 engineers), Attio (2 engineers), Figma (2 engineers), and The Browser Company (1 product, 1 engineer).
Quality-First Hiring
The desire to build great things is contagious. You dilute if you surround yourself with people motivated by something other than making a product people love. Talent density doesn't come from an edge in recruiting or compensation - it comes from great people wanting to work with other great people.
Examples of these patterns include having employees from other companies that have pride in quality (like Apple) or looking for people who seem to be "going to die if they don't make the best thing." This critically applies to all functions.
This critically applies to all functions — each needs to care about a high level of craft. Generalists, like designers who also code, will better understand the other disciplines in cross-functional teams. Engineers should be trained in the language of craft and can independently implement their ideas. You can only achieve a high level of craft when your engineers build it.
Staying Small
The best product teams stay small as long as possible. They resist the venture-backed urge to grow teams quickly, preferring minimal size to reduce friction. They will remain as small as possible as long as possible — but when scaling the org, they rely on strong underlying values to reduce discussion and maintain quality.
Transitioning from a founder's singular vision to a multi-layered organization is an additional challenge when growing the team size. The longer you can maintain that singular vision, the better.
Notably absent? A definition of the "right" process.
The Bottom Line
It's easy to get lost in processes and best practices. That's especially true with the increasing number of frameworks that are getting attention in the product world. Let that not distract you.
What really matters is building something that connects with people – something that makes them feel, that helps them achieve.
Quality isn't just about polish. It's about understanding what matters deeply enough to know what doesn't.