Decentralizing Quality
Source: matthewstrom.com
We all knew that Stripe’s founder Patrick Collison preferred interfaces that were densely packed and full of efficient shortcuts and keyboard commands; teams would bias their work towards Patrick’s preferences to ensure a smoother review and approval process. We weren’t solving user problems. We were solving for Patrick’s aesthetic sensibility. At one point, Patrick sent out a memo imploring teams to stop this preemptive bias, but it only added another recursive layer to the feedback process: it had to meet Patrick’s high expectations, but steer clear of sicophancy.