Mar 29, 2023

“Craft at scale” is a white whale

Designers and product-folk like to think of ourselves as craftspeople. We care about making things great. Is it possible to do it at scale? Shot and chaser:

• The Cost of Craft - Longtime Meta designer George Kedenburg III did us all a favor and exhaustively documented the challenges of delivering “great” at scale. It’s well worth your time.
• Big Tech’s big downgrade - in this Business Insider piece, Ed Zitron details how and why the largest tech companies — like Meta — are actively making their products worse for users.

George nails the problems, and in credit to his fortitude and optimism, leaves you with the idea that craft at scale is possible. I’m less optimistic. If you look at the available evidence, “craft at scale” is mutually exclusive with the kind of rapid and unending growth that’s the baseline expectation for traditional startups and public tech companies.

We’d say that’s obvious in other industries. Budweiser isn’t craft beer. IKEA isn’t heirloom-quality furniture. But we tend to treat software as immune to the typical relationship between quality and quantity. It’s software! It can infinitely replicate!

There’s some truth to that idea. Moving from making 100 sandwiches a day to 100,000 requires a fundamental shift in tools and process that inevitably leads to quality loss. Meanwhile, an indie dev can ship the same software to 100 or 100,000 people without doing anything different. As George points out, the tension between craft and scale in tech has much more to do with the size of the product you’re building and the speed at which you’re trying to build it.

Funded startups and public tech companies need to keep the high-growth engine running, which inevitably leads progressively larger and more complex product offerings that attempt to attract more and more users. No single team can deliver on that, which leads directly to disjointed and/or competing teams, and a steady erosion of vision that’s backfilled by process. This is the inflection point where you’re now “manufacturing” software.

Growing the surface area of the product only takes you so far though. You eventually hit some kind of saturation point, and what follows is the kind of shitification Ed outlines. The focus shifts from quality to “value extraction”, which leads to higher prices, worse customer service, manipulative or deceptive products, monopoly lock-in, etc.

If you’re a designer at a large tech company, you cannot and will not overcome this. If you look at Apple — arguably one of the few companies that’s been able deliver craft at scale for any amount of time — they did so because Steve Jobs was a true believer who did more that espouse belief; he hired, fired, inspired and cajoled his way to an org built around delivering on it. It has to come from the very top for craft at scale to be a remote possibility.

Jesper Kouthoofd of Teenage Engineering recognizes that craft and rapid, unending growth are fundamentally at odds:

We only want to make great products and when you don’t focus only on making money and have reached a certain level, everything becomes about quality. Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same, it’s like fast food: it looks good, its taste it’s consistent but then you feel horrible afterwards.

If pursuit of craft is what drives you, you need to find smaller, slower waters.