The Standards That Build Great Products
"When I look at things, I could see, 'This could be better.'" — Karri Saarinen
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." — attributed to many
What Makes a Brand? Lessons in Design and Trust
Most people think of a brand as only the logo or the color palette, however in Y Combinator's episode "How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out" Karri Saarinen reframes it far more extensively: a brand is every interaction a user has with your product and your company.
Early on as startups, we evidently place an emphasis on the design of our products, however at times we fail to acknowledge that brand is everything from your logo, to your UX, to how your sales team communicates with your customers.
Saarinen, a designer‑turned‑founder, brings this higher perspective shaped by deeply integrating design into product strategy. Today he is co‑founder and CEO of Linear, which provides a fast, minimalist project management and issue-tracking tool designed specifically for high-performing software development teams — simplifying the entire product development workflow, from planning to release, as an efficient alternative to more complex and legacy tools like Jira. It is used and even deemed crucial by Perplexity and OpenAI.
Previous to Linear, Saarinen was one of the first designers at Coinbase (an online platform for buying, selling, transferring, and storing cryptocurrency) and later a lead designer at Airbnb, playing an imperative role in shaping experiences for two of the largest platforms today.
Early in the episode Saarinen says that YC helped him understand that building companies does not have to be so complicated, "You just need the singular focus of making progress, building something for the customers." he then says that everything else will come either later or automatically.
How true is this? With all the countless variables at play, it's all too easy to get sidetracked in the process of creating a successful startup, however maintaining such a perspective will serve as a vital anchor in your endeavours.
In this post, using both Saarinen and Steve Jobs as examples, we will explore this notion further and see how one can achieve the ultimate brand by prioritizing four pillars: the power of simplicity, psychology-driven connection, validated learning, and the transformation of quality from a goal into a habit.
"If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design." — Dr. Ralf Speth
Redefining Coinbase at a Critical Period
When Saarinen joined Coinbase, the company faced a challenge: it had a functioning product, but its visual and emotional aspects lacked clarity.
Cryptocurrency at the time (2014) was widely perceived as speculative, opaque, and high‑risk.
Coinbase needed something more besides usability; it needed trust.
During the episode, it was even mentioned that at the start, Coinbase seemed almost like "a hack project."
Seeing the predicament, Saarinen introduced simplicity and restraint as core principles, reshaping interfaces to be cleaner, more intuitive, and easier to navigate for users without technical backgrounds.
In removing this cognitive friction, he helped users feel confident making decisions that by nature, involved significant financial risk. Coinbase stopped feeling like a niche tool for insiders and instead began to feel reliable and accessible.
This simplicity implied visual noise with clean typography, deliberate spacing, and a restrained color palette, all design choices that stood in contrast to the abstract and speculative aesthetics typical of the crypto industry in 2014.
At this point, instead of looking like just another volatile trading platform; it projected the stability and professionalism of an established financial institution.
This evolution in perception was decisive in making Coinbase what it is today.
Brand, Experience, and Human Psychology
"You cannot understand good design if you don't understand people." — Dieter Rams
Saarinen’s impact at Coinbase infused a product‑design mindset that aligned brand expression with user experience and human psychology. Every decision — from layout to language to visual tone, consequently, reinforced the consistent message that Coinbase is stable, understandable, and committed to protecting its users.
This clarifies the concept that brand is not just decoration like many beginners believe. it is a strategic asset at the forefront of product value. Effective branding shapes user perception and builds the essential trust required for comfortable engagement with your company.
Another example I often return to is Steve Jobs at Apple. Jobs understood something many early-stage founders overlook: products do not win solely on functionality, but on how they make people feel. He possessed a deep command of human psychology and used that to transform technology into desire.
Jobs also believed that marketing was about values, not only features. He famously looked at Nike as a model: Nike sells shoes, yet they rarely talk about the rubber soles or the stitching. Instead, they honor great athletes.
Again encapsulating the nuances of human tendencies, he enhanced the Apple brand by calling his inventions "the biggest thing since the printing press". Jobs would thus anchor the brand in history. This made people feel that to not have an Apple product was to be left behind by the next great leap in their time.
The Power of Simplicity
Moving from human behaviour and onto quality and simplicity — Jobs being influenced by Zen Buddhism which has deep ties to minimalism, made a central focus on stripping products down to their essence, and obsessed over the most minute details.
For example, he insisted that the circuit boards inside the original Macintosh be laid out neatly, even though the casing was sealed and customers wouldn't see them. He compared it to a master carpenter finishing the back of a chest of drawers with the same high-quality wood as the front.
He also relented over the click of a button, the weight of a laptop lid, or the way a box slid open. He wanted the unboxing process to be like a "ritual" that signaled the quality of the brand before the device was even turned on.
Before the iPod, MP3 players were cluttered with buttons and complex menus. Jobs insisted to engineers that a user should be able to get to any song in just three clicks.
The mechanical scroll wheel then came to fruition, which we know allowed users to navigate thousands of songs with a single thumb movement, replacing a dozen navigation buttons with just one interface. Jobs’ obsession with the 'essence' of a product reveals what is truly required to achieve a whole different league in business. It's a rigorous pursuit of the minimalist ideal — the belief that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
However, achieving this simplicity isn't always easy; as we see it's the fruit of exhaustive application.
Jobs discusses the process, "Designing a product is keeping five-thousand things in your brain… fitting them all together… continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want… and every day you discover something new that is a new problem or new opportunity… And it's that process that is the magic."
Now implementing this simplicity ideal together with our aforementioned anchor: the singular focus on making progress by building for the consumer, any entrepreneur can be successful in their own right.
Sounds simple. However, when one pays closer attention, especially to later stage companies, this simple facet drops into a maelstrom of over-complication, in part to sales and marketing running the front lines to accelerate shareholder value, compared to the minds creating the products.
Validated Learning
Before jumping to the last pillar, I wanted to expand on the shift that allows for iteratively improving a product for consumers.
Beyond just vision, building for consumers demands disciplined learning. In "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries, the concept of validated learning reframes entrepreneurship as a structured, scientific process, think of the scientific method — treating your startup as an experiment to learn empirically what works and what doesn't.
Rather than treating product development as a straight path toward a fixed idea, it becomes a continuous cycle of hypothesis, experimentation, measurement, and refinement. Asking questions like:
Are you implementing A/B testing? What assumptions is your company making?What specific feedback are your customers giving?
Questions like these will inevitably become a North Star, guiding the path toward the development of products that will truly stand out.
The best founders don't assume they are right; they design systems that allow them to discover what is right.
The Transformation of Quality From a Goal Into a Habit
Lastly, in most early-stage companies, speed and quality are seen as opposing forces, as typically seen in Silicon Valley — however Karri Saarinen, dismantles this tradeoff through the way he’s created Linear.
The company maintains small, cross-functional teams that are responsible for the entire product lifecycle, from concept to completion. This eliminates "handoffs" between specialized departments (like product managers, designers, engineers), which typically slow down development and dilute quality.
Designers and engineers share full responsibility for product outcomes. They collaborate directly and iterate fast, guided by set standards — following the philosophy that "Product must never be slow" and where quality is the default, not a checkpoint.
Another good example of direct collaboration is Elon Musk:
"Elon restructured the company so that there was not a separate engineering department. Instead, engineers would team up with project managers. It was a philosophy that he would carry through to Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for disfunction. Designers had to feel the immediate pain if something they devised was hard to engineer. Engineers, rather than product managers, should lead the team." — David Senra from the Founders podcast
Speed and quality can coexist then, but one has to be ready to instill the operational discipline needed for it. As you study business history, you will find many examples of engineers successfully hitting extraordinarily tight deadlines. The quality won't always match the speed, but in some cases, indeed it has.
Each choice, no matter how small, reveals the standards you are practicing, the discipline you are strengthening, and as a result the identity you are gradually becoming. The way you answer a call, clean a workspace, keep your word, prepare for a meeting, or finish a task when no one is watching all points back to the same inner system. Excellence isn't something reserved for big moments; but built in the ordinary ones.
This is where quality transforms from a goal into a habit. At first, quality may feel like something you aim for: a target or benchmark. However when repeated with intention, it becomes less about trying to “do a good job” and more about becoming the kind of person or organization that naturally produces good work. Quality stops being a final inspection and becomes part of the process itself.
When quality becomes a habit, standards are no longer negotiable based on mood, convenience, or visibility. The small things begin to matter because they train the larger things. A rushed detail teaches carelessness. A finished detail teaches pride. A skipped step weakens trust. A repeated act of precision strengthens confidence.
Over time, these repeated behaviors become a culture, whether in a person, a team, or an entire organization.