Quality Is Growth: Making the ROI Case
Kill the 'business goals vs design goals' framing by collecting the quality wins that moved your own metrics.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
The standard objection to investing in quality is that its ROI is unclear versus shipping another feature. Dill's counter is that quality is growth, not its opponent, and that the way to win the argument internally is not rhetoric but evidence: every company already has examples where a quality improvement moved a business metric — find them, quantify them, and make them known so teams generate their own ideas about where quality and metrics coincide.
Origin
Katie Dill's practice at Stripe, backed by Stripe's own checkout research and Optimized Checkout conversion data. The underlying belief ('quality is growth', not growth vs quality) is her reframing of a common industry dichotomy.
Core principles
- 01'Business goals vs design goals' is a false dichotomy — the first conversation should be 'what are we trying to build'.
- 02Quality improvements that make a product easier to understand drive usage, retention, and word of mouth.
- 03Some quality returns are short-term and directly measurable; some are long-term (trust, referral, success rates). Both are real.
- 04Beauty increases trust: visible care about details signals care about the details users cannot see.
- 05Beauty begets beauty — visible craft attracts both users and the talent who want their craft to matter.
How to run it
- 1
Reframe the conversation upstream of goals
Before splitting into 'business' and 'design' goals, ask what the team is actually trying to build. If the answer is 'something great that serves customers and builds a stronger business long-term', the dichotomy dissolves.
Pro tip Multi-disciplinary teams are the checks and balances here — the designer worrying about how it feels and the PM wanting a bigger button are both doing their job.
- 2
Instrument the quality wins you already have
Every company has cases where a quality fix moved a metric. Find them, measure them, and write them down. Support-contact reduction, activation, conversion, and error rates are the usual carriers.
Pro tip Look first at onboarding and support tickets — the two places where quality defects convert most directly into measurable cost.
Watch out Don't stop at the ones that moved in a quarter; name the long-horizon ones too, and be explicit that they take longer to read.
- 3
Broadcast the examples across the company
Make the quality-to-metric links known widely, so other teams get ideas: 'we could do this in our team too — we could have a higher quality product and actually move the business metrics.'
Pro tip Advocacy at the highest levels of the company is what makes these examples land instead of being read as a design pitch.
- 4
Redefine 'impact' in performance rubrics
Explicitly define what impact means in your performance rubric so it can include multi-quarter, instrumental, and hard-to-measure work — then celebrate and recognize great work that did not move a number this quarter.
Pro tip Back it with level ladders and operating principles that name quality and craft as expected of every role.
Watch out If impact is defined only as 'which business metric did I move and by how much', teams will rationally starve quality forever.
- 5
Hire and trust for judgment rather than mandating a quota
Rather than imposing a formula (e.g. 10% fixing, 20% growth, rest keeping the lights on), Stripe hires people with great judgment and pride in what they build, advocates for quality from the top, and lets multi-disciplinary teams make the trade-offs in planning.
Pro tip Quotas are a fallback for organizations that cannot yet trust the judgment of their teams.
In the wild
Stripe researched checkout on top e-commerce sites and found that 99% of them had errors in their checkout flow hindering seamless, quick checkout — pure quality defects, not missing features. Stripe spent years improving the checkout experience through details small and large.
→ Businesses moving from the older checkout to the newer one saw a 10.5% increase in revenue.
Stripe's growth team focused on making onboarding easier to understand — clarifying what the products are and how they map to different use cases — rather than adding features.
→ Activations increased, tying quality improvements directly to a growth metric.
Users kept contacting support because they could not tell the state of an invoice; a button looked nice but was not clear enough about how to access what they wanted.
→ Clarifying it decreased support contacts and improved the bottom line.
Common mistakes
Arguing for quality on principle alone
Asserting 'we should care about craft' without evidence loses to the team with a measurable feature. The counter is your own company's quality-to-metric examples, not a manifesto.
Believing quality doesn't move metrics
Dill calls this an actively dangerous and false belief. Some returns are long-horizon, but many — conversion, activation, support load — land inside a quarter.
Splitting the room into 'business' and 'design' goals
The framing itself creates the trade-off it pretends to describe, and turns designers into a cost centre arguing for exceptions.
Is it for you?
Best for
A design or product leader who keeps losing the quality-vs-features prioritization argument and needs to make the ROI legible to a metrics-driven leadership team.
Not ideal for
Companies where nothing is instrumented at all — you need at least basic funnel and support data before this argument has ammunition.
From the transcript
“it's growth versus quality but like quality is growth”
“we found that 99% of the top e-commerce sites have errors in their checkout flow”
“we have seen a 10.5% increase in business's revenue from that”
“we have seen activations increase because we've made these quality improvements that are just directly tied to growth”
“things that are more beautiful increase trust”
From the episode
Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design
Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft)