Crafting quality that endures

I know I post about Linear quite a bit here on Build Signals, but there’s good reason (they’re building right!).

From the very start of co-founding Linear (the project management tool), Karri and the team have had a near-obsession with quality.

The argument here is that shipping fast shouldn’t exclude quality.

My add-on is that, having worked with hundreds of product and engineering teams, teams often focus on completing what’s on the ticket within an amount of time, rather than ship high-quality updates that actually move the needle. That’s about intention rather than skill.

My take:

• ‘Craft’ has gotten a bad-rap in recent years, but it’s actually a winning move to building better business

• Designers aren't just craftspeople but potential founders, capable of building the tools that future generations will rely upon

• “Designer + AI fluency + clear user insight”.

Key quote: “Tech makes it faster to build, but harder to care.”

Just like I said last issue: Designers? It’s a great time to build.

Watch the video on YouTube

Aura: The Chat Builder

If you’re not great at prompting, don’t worry. This tool writes prompts for you in seconds.

Welcome to Aura, the AI-powered design assistant that helps you create beautiful designs with ease. Aura combines the power of AI with intuitive design tools to help you create stunning designs faster than ever.

Whether you're a professional designer or just getting started, Aura has features that will help you work more efficiently.

My take:

• If you're not going to learn code or even design, get familiar with the vocabulary and build your taste. This is a good way to start.

• Prompting well isn’t just technical. It’s strategic. The best prompts come from people who understand the problem deeply, not just the syntax.

• In vibe coding, your real job isn’t typing better instructions. It’s holding a clear vision and using the model to fill in the shape.

• Treat prompting like sketching. Messy, fast, iterative. You’re not asking for perfection, you’re exploring the edges.

Check out Aura

RIP Enterprise SaaS? In-house Micro SaaS is In

I wanted to share this post I saved on LinkedIn earlier this week for a few key reasons.

First, this is absolutely a great move. Take HR and culture. The way your business cares, motivates and captures what’s happening with your team can rarely be bought 100% off the shelf from a SaaS business. I’ve seen companies use a bit of say HiBob, a bit of Harvest’s Forecast (especially in agencies), supplemented by some Slack automation and spreadsheets to manually link personal performance with company values and reward system.

Taking a step back, that’s crazy.

Now, your team (or an external partner), can create a HR software within a few weeks, cheaper than ever, that DIRECTLY works for how you work.

And that’s just an example in HR.

My take:

• A lot of this is about human behaviour and ‘the way we’ve always done it.’ Decision-makers are hard-wired to buy instead of build because you have the ‘imagination gap’ to cross of what is possible

• Show don’t tell - take a few hours, demo what’s possible and get buy-in. Some of this can be framed as cost saving, but the real deal is about software that directly correlates to how you work

Key quote: “Anyone can make micro-SaaS customised perfectly for their own teams.”

Read the LinkedIn post

Sonos CEO didn’t understand the real world (beware the big redesign)

Interim Sonos CEO Tom Conrad has said that two of the unpopular decisions the company made were deliberate, but the biggest problem was that it failed to understand how its products were used in the real world.

Sonos would never have released the new app had it fully appreciated the difference between its lab testing environment and real homes.

Dan Olsen captured it perfectly: “They had good intentions with their "most extensive app redesign ever," as all companies do. But these complex projects often do not go well. When you're redesigning a product that many customers love, it's important to remember the advice "First, do no harm."“

My take:

• There’s a ‘difference between [its] lab testing environment and real homes’ - and also testing with your colleagues VS with real customers in their environment

• Stories like this discredit redesigns, and sometimes quite rightly. Iteration and small, frequent updates to parts of a product can massively de-risk updates and experiments that you absolutely need to make

• The redesign proved unpopular - which just demonstrates that it was done in a vacuum

Key quote: “No reasonable person would’ve shipped the software if we had understood the reliability and performance characteristics of the product in our customers’ homes.”

Read on 9to5 Mac