Quality is Context: Good design starts with shared understanding

Everyone talks about quality. Few define it. And fewer still know how to build it. In many design conversations, we talk about quality as if it were universal. As if everyone agreed on what good looks like. But here’s the thing: they don’t. And without trust, no one is waiting for your definition. They already have their own.

Quality is never neutral

Quality doesn’t live in the pixels. It lives in the problem. In the choices we make. In the trade-offs we frame. It’s shaped by constraints, intentions, and the system we’re in. That’s why quality can’t be judged in isolation. It only makes sense in context.

»Polish without purpose is noise.«

Paul Stamatiou, Craft (2015)

Too often, I’ve seen teams chase quality by refining the wrong thing. Or leaders reject work because it doesn’t match their taste, not because it fails the context. And that’s a problem, because when experience is seen only as the surface, the visual layer, it’s the first to be cut when speed is needed. But quality in experience isn’t about polish. It’s about relevance. Accessibility. Trust. It’s how well a solution fits the moment and the people it’s for. Taste is not enough. Process is not enough. Quality starts earlier. It starts with understanding.

Context is the real craft

As a design leader, I spend more time these days setting up the conditions than pushing pixels. We don’t define quality alone. We build shared understanding, so others start asking better questions.

  • What problem are we solving?
  • What matters most right now?
  • What’s the user trying to achieve?

»Good taste is just contextual understanding with a longer memory.«

Linear Blog, Why is Quality So Rare? (2021) 

Designers alone are not the only ones seeking this. I teamed up with product managers, customer success, product marketing, and sales to create a broad spectrum of cross-functional networks to discuss, capture data to understand, and build this context together. Because small fragments of it appear in every part of the user or customer journey.

When people begin to see the context, they also start adjusting their sense of what good means. It’s not just about agreeing. It’s about aligning. Once I started initiating these discussions, I noticed something shift. The context became visible across the company. People understood what we’re doing and why we’re not doing other things. That momentum needs to be nurtured over time, and it’s never complete.

Context is constructed

The ability to define and hold context is not just a design skill; it’s a leadership responsibility. Since context doesn’t exist objectively, it needs active creation by making sense of situations, putting things into perspective, and aligning meaning across teams.

In fast-paced organizations, speed creates momentum, but not always meaning. If no one is shaping the context, people fall back on assumptions. And quality doesn’t emerge from assumption; it emerges from clarity. From a shared space where intent, constraint, and relevance meet. Enabling this kind of collaboration between different parts of a company is an uncomfortable position. It involves Fingerspitzengefühl [dexterity] in contact with teams and other leaders, the ability to withhold tension, stepping out of our core area, and it can lead to being viewed as unambitious, pessimistic, and not aligned. Not as a representative from your core expertise but as a leader.

»Contextualization is the act of making sense, of providing meaning, of putting things into perspective. It is a verb, not a noun — something people do, not something they have.«

Weick, K. E. (1995/2024), Understanding the Process of Contextualization, Organizational Journal of Learning

Speed vs. Quality: The false trade-off

Startups love speed. Fast cycles, fast launches, fast progress. But often, speed gets confused with progress  and experience work is seen as something to polish later. That’s a mistake. When we skip quality, we don’t go faster. We go more blind.

Experience isn’t just a layer you apply after the MVP is done. It’s a system of signals that shape how people understand, use, and trust your product. Cutting corners here creates debt that shows up later in support, in churn, in unclear strategy.

Design helps teams balance speed with clarity. Not by slowing down, but by asking better questions earlier. Without shared understanding, velocity is just motion. With context, speed becomes momentum.

»Quality is not only about outcomes, but about the way decisions are made.«

Peter Merholz, What is good design, anyway? (2019) 

Design leadership is quality leadership

Great design leaders don’t just ship polished work. They shape the conversations that define what good means for this team, this moment, this challenge.

That means creating space to reflect. To challenge assumptions. To hold tension between speed and depth.

Moves to lead by

A few things I’ve learned (and sometimes failed at):

  • Shift from Taste to Principles
    Taste doesn’t scale. Principles do. If you root decisions in company values, you move the debate from »I like this« to »Does this reflect what we agreed matters?«

    Example: Together with the experience team, I worked with the C-level and collected input from teams to translate company values into experience principles. These became a decision framework across teams. Instead of endless taste debates, people had something concrete to anchor decisions in.
  • Build Shared Context Loops
    Context doesn’t live in one team. It’s scattered across product, sales, marketing, and customer success. If no one connects the dots, people just fill the gaps with assumptions.

    Example: I set up regular sessions with PMM, Customer Success, Product, and Sales where we brought together user research and customer input, interpreted it as a group, and shared it back into our teams. That practice created a living context we could all use instead of siloed guesses.
  • Define a Quality Narrative, Not a Checklist
    Quality isn’t a static definition. It’s a story that explains why we do things a certain way and what customers actually value. Without that narrative, teams chase polish or efficiency in the wrong places.

    Example: Together with customer success, I shared a quality narrative based on what customers said they appreciated most in working with us. We turned that into a reference point across teams. It shifted conversations from “Does this look good?” to “Does this fit the story we want to tell?”
  • Weave Experience into the Company Story
    Experience work gains weight when it connects to the larger story of the company. People see quality not as “design polish” but as part of how the company shows up in the market.

    Example: I used the founders’ story and our go-to-market positioning as a red thread. By embedding this narrative into how revenue, product, and engineering teams communicated, we made sure experience wasn’t a side note but part of the core story everyone carried forward.

Conclusion: Context is quality

Quality isn’t an attribute you add at the end. It’s the outcome of many small, aligned decisions. And those decisions only align when the context is shared. Design doesn’t own quality. But it can hold the space where can emerge.

That’s not decoration. That’s leadership.