A Design Manager’s perspective.
In the last few months quality craft has bubbled up to the top of the design conversation and designers are now prioritizing quality craft as a major topic. Folks are considering how to show the highest level of crafts and internally company cultures are shifting. Everyone is looking for the highest “quality craft” yet so rarely do I see or hear this articulated past the “rockstar” analogy.
As a manager I had to pause and reevaluate what quality craft looks like and how do I articulate this in ways other than a “vibe” or a “feeling”. It’s important for me to have vocabulary around this because very quickly I believe design can and is falling into a pattern of “iykyk” for quality craft.
What does quality craft mean as a manager?
This will always be subjective – because there are many factors around work that make it high quality craft. I believe quality craft is the ability to execute work at a level that is aligned to your experience, the needs of the customer, usability, simplicity, accessible and feasible. I believe that quality craft is bringing in moments of delight with care, and looking at details that allow someone to experience a product without having to have additional cognitive loads or decision making. It’s less distracting, it’s details of the fonts chosen and the colors that evoke a brand voice. It’s also how well folks can bring work to life – prototyping I believe is at the core of “quality craft” and what is expected of folks at this moment in time. Quality craft is the care and attention that goes into creating the entirety of an experience, from the storytelling that starts the moments you see page one of a slide and an intro, and bringing the customer into an experience. Quality craft is balanced, it can be simple or intricate but does not feel like an unintendedly complex experience. This is a start to articulating it and it goes into more detail based on the company your at as well. I could carry on, but that is not the only thing this piece is about.
Design as a tool has evolved and will continue to evolve over time. I have shifted through design from the importance of kerning in letters to ensure balanced typography to looking at corner radius pixels zoomed in. All important for different moments and times.
However on a daily basis I am not designing! I am managing a team, giving feedback and then playing around in Figma with my own projects after work by choice.
As a design manager my role sits at the responsibility of my team executing excellent quality craft, having strong opinions, and knowing when to pivot. Similar to any standard crit this has to be refined as a practice as you shift to the needs of a business as well. My role as a manager, and as someone who hires folks is to ensure there is as much clarity as possible around these expectations.
Study your design system
In order to understand the quality craft of my org, I had to rekindle my adoration for the design system that my designers work with. To critique what we could improve or do differently, I needed to reacquaint myself with the design system. Taking a look daily and studying the details gave me a chance to refresh my pov. Having weeks where I had been caught up in planning, strategy or org design can mean less time in the details of Figma which is important for me. Spending more time with the DS taught me how to partner better with my team. Leading my team to develop micro design systems and understand how to work more effectively in our platform. Spending time with the design system gives me clear parameters for feasibility, what changes might not scale and what gaps may be there in quality craft. An example of this is refreshing myself with all of the semantic colors that helps me to identify if a behavior is clear and are giving the best indicator to a customer for perhaps a new behavior we are introducing. This time empowers me to have more specific, craft-focused conversations with my team.
Understand your ecosystem
Quality craft will look different depending on your organization’s perspective at the time and where the business is going. For some it may mean an increase in storytelling through decks, at the moment there is a big push for prototypes that execute transition, motion and interaction design. However the shift is happening and conversations should be had. Aligning with your product design leadership is critical in being able to scale this across an entire organization and to keep consistency across the board. It also means that I may not always get a direct answer. This has happened in the past and when it does, I pivot and navigate.
The critical conversations that have sparked from me laddering questions up and across have helped me to articulate a perspective of expectations for and from my leadership as well. I can then share these expectations with my team, shift how we do crit, and go across to partners and setting expectations with peers in product, engineering and research. This is also a moment to define the shift when no one feels sure what quality craft should look like within an org. I have found that sparking a convo with a POV gives space for peers to share what it is or isn’t. In some cases it’s giving folks something to react to and test, because they have not yet been able to articulate what that looks like for them. The push for quality craft may come from the top down, but as design leaders we can shape it based on what we know best – the people using the product.
Quality Craft in practice
Playing with the tools creates empathy. I do not design in Figma daily – I play with Figma as a tool for my personal projects, and spend time providing feedback and looking through user flows. However in order for me to understand what ICs are doing and crafting it has been helpful for me to be in the tools. To go into Figma and play with components to mock up a page, to try to build smooth prototypes, and the goal is not to make it perfect but to understand what it is that I am asking folks to do. Playing with tools like V0 and Cursor, learning how to set up a Figma MCP (because I was so confused) – really enabled me to understand how long something could take, possibility and how the designs might translate. Yes, I could get an intricate interaction detail from Cursor, but the fonts and some of the colors may not match exactly b/c of tool limitations. Understanding that I may have to trade off an exact font match just to show an interactive state, because in that moment that is what needs to be examined closely. As a designer I will always be curious about tools, and as a manager I feel more empowered to give feedback if I understand fully what the tools can and most importantly can not do.
I also believe that a manager making the time to look at the landscape and what folks are building, copying and doing is important to understand the demographic for whom we are designing for and to be future facing. Spending time doing my own personal app tear down of the apps in my phone, looking at inspiration on sites, and doing comp audits helps me to readjust my baseline. It also reminds me to trust my gut which has been honed on years of experience and the practice of being a customer and designer. I am also responsible to then articulate and translate this into lots of words – and share how these apps work and make me feel, and put it into practice through spaces like crit. Every day there is some app I am using on my phone. Is it working well, what could be better, does it make things easier for me? Using this base line I can reassess the work I am reviewing through a new lens that adapts even more critically to the new environment. It’s also really helpful to look at the creative landscape to see what trends are taking place – Liquid glass is redefing the iOS experience and observing how we all adjust to this will impact what quality craft looks like over the next 12-18 months.
Crit is the place
I believe that crit is one of the vital spaces to hone quality craft. Critique is the disciple that has been a part of design for decades and serves to assess the work and how to improve it. Taking the time in crit to explore divergent options, look at various prototypes, ask questions about the decision and provide space for designers to review is a critical part in this shift to quality craft. As I align my understanding of my org I can shift to what is most important within the quality craft, which is more than just the execution but the why in the decision making as well. Even if a solution seems initially well crafted, did it actually solve a problem for the people using it? It’s also important to make space to be wrong, when a designer shows me a strong solution and walks through their why it’s a refreshing reminder that I can be wrong and learn from that experience. I won’t get it right 100% of the time.
What about the generalist, what about the strategist
There are so many facets of product design. Currently the focus is quality craft and executions of precise design detail. I do believe that this is an important part of the role but not the only part of it. I don’t know what is going to happen for designers who are not focused on this at the moment when every post, every role is about quality craft. I believe designers can uplevel this skill with time and practice. As a manager there is an opportunity to coach and provide resources as well. This includes visual design, typography and advocating for resources for your teams continued growth – investing in people! However how do we ensure we just don’t fall into everything in the industry looking the same – those are thoughts for another day. In the interim that is to be seen.
Get down to details
Rather than waiting to see that happens with quality craft I encourage folks to get curious. For my managers in particular I encourage you to push your vocabulary and expand with clarification what good and better could mean when reviewing work. Here are my go-to’s at the moment:
- IC Design Rubrics.
Spend time aligning, studying and understanding the rubric for each level of IC within your organization. Quality craft is going to differ from an IC1- IC5 – become reacquainted with these standards. Does your org lack them? Reach out and help define them. It will simplify your job and how you evaluate your team’s work. - Design System
Study the design system to better understand what the parameters are that designers are working within. This will enables me to know what I can ask for in terms of bigger more complex changes that impact the DS vs smaller details that may have been missed. Spending time with the DS provides me with vocabulary that enables better feedback so rather than “lets just move this over a bit because that feels better” – and I can ask for “let’s use this padding that is standardized for H3 text because it allows for clearly legibility on mobile devices” - Practice and play
It builds empathy to use the tools, this empathy expands the approaches for what I now use to define quality craft. Understanding the limitations and capabilities strengthens my convos with cross-functional partners and sets clearer expectations of what they are looking to see from design.
Good luck to all of us! My wishes for 2026 is that quality craft is not just a vibe but another way for design to articulate and connect the entirety of a business. I hope to keep putting this to practice and that we move away from just “iykyk” because at the end of the day this becomes more exclusionary in practice, and believe we can do better and use our words – all of them!