Decentralizing quality: Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run

Everyone agrees quality matters, but we can’t agree on what it is — or who gets to decide.

I’ve experienced the drive for quality in every design leadership role I’ve had. When it comes to software, we like to pretend that quality is a number. Dashboards stand in for judgment, A/B tests stand in for taste, and leaders try to will excellence into existence with reviews and mandates. But in today’s software market, confusing a KPI with quality isn’t just naïve; it’s fatal. Consumers’ attention spans are short, but their expectations are higher than ever; if your product fails to solve a real problem in an elegant way, you don’t get a second chance.

Some companies see the value of quality and are building their brand around it. Linear, for example, has launched an entire Conversations on Quality series, because quality has become the currency every builder wants to be paid in. In my time at Stripe, the pursuit of quality was nearly obsessive: 99.999% uptime (about five minutes of downtime a year) was the bare minimum. On the user experience side, we created a program to standardize and report on quality across every product team in the company. Last year, Malthe Sigurdsson (who led design at Stripe from 2015–2020) rejoined as “Head of Craft” to drive quality across design.

But more and more I’ve come to believe that quality isn’t a slogan, a program, or a scorecard. It’s a promise kept at the edge by the people doing the work. And, ideally, quality is fundamental to the product itself, where users can judge it without our permission. That’s the shift we need: away from heroics at the center, toward systems that make quality inevitable.

The stakes are high. Centralized quality — slogans, KPIs, executive decrees — can produce positive results, but it’s brittle. Decentralized quality — continuous feedback, distributed ownership, emergent standards — builds resilience. In this essay, I’d like to make the case that the future belongs to those who can decentralize their mindset and approach to quality.

What is quality?

We can’t build quality products if we can’t define what quality is. It’s a slippery thing to grab, though: In a 1984 MIT Sloan Management Review article, David Garvin described five different approaches to defining quality across eight dimensions. Ultimately, he gives up on defining quality and argues for multiple definitions. That’s a cop-out in my book, so here’s my one-sentence definition of quality.

Quality is the degree to which a product or service meets or exceeds user expectations.

Why did I land on that particular definition? First, I have a strong conviction in the subjectivity of quality. Put simply, quality depends on users’ or consumers’ perception. Expectations are dynamic and relative, so quality can vary by user and change over time as our expectations, the products we buy, or that competitive landscape evolves.

Next, I chose this definition to remove tastemakers from the equation. McDonald’s can be quality food because people buy a Big Mac and expect a double-decker hamburger with special sauce. Ikea can be quality furniture because college students expect an affordable desk for their dorm. It’s only when reality falls out of sync with expectations that quality is questionable.

Lastly, my definition of quality is especially adapted for software, where products and expectations change constantly. Subscription-based software-as-a-service is the norm, and apps are updated daily. We expect constant, cheap or free internet access thanks to cell phones, wifi, and satellite internet. Tools that still seem like science fiction — voice recognition, machine learning, and search algorithms — give us answers in milliseconds.

Building quality software is already hard. Before ChatGPT’s 2022 release, it was absurd to imagine a computer composing a structurally perfect 14-line sonnet about Iggy Azalea’s musical influences. Now, news of an AI passing the bar exam barely deserves a push alert. With technology advancing more and more rapidly, it will only get harder to understand and exceed consumer expectations.

This relentless acceleration puts enormous pressure on software builders. How do you maintain quality when the definition keeps shifting beneath your feet? Many companies bet on strong leadership — charismatic executives who can produce quality products with pithy catch phrases and aggressive incentives.

Ford Motor Company tried exactly this approach, and their story is a perfect study in leadership-driven quality control.

Quality is Job 1

In the early 1980s, Ford Motor Company launched the iconic slogan “Quality is Job 1.” It wasn’t just a marketing angle; it was a genuine commitment by Ford to improve vehicle quality, winning back consumers from global competition.

A decade before, Ford, like other American automakers, struggled to maintain market dominance. New environmental and safety regulations, along with increased labor activism, challenged the car manufacturing status quo. They scrambled to hold on to profits, causing rippling quality compromises. The Ford Pinto is an example of how these feedback loops got out of control.

Before 1970, Ford identified potential issues with the gas tank placement in its smaller cars and designed a new, safer one. But when designing the Pinto, analysts determined that a rubber bladder safety system would add just $5.08 to the cost of each car—less than a quarter of one percent of the Pinto’s $1,919 retail price—and chose the older, cheaper, less safe design instead.

A 1978 Ford Pinto Associated Press

These cost-saving choices had consequences. In June 1978, a California jury awarded $128 million to a boy badly burned in a Pinto accident. Two months later, a speeding van hit the driver of a '73 Pinto from behind, causing the gas tank to explode and killing the driver and two passengers. After a damning exposé in Mother Jones, Ford agreed to recall all 1.5 million Pintos made between 1971 and 1976.

While the “big 3” American auto manufacturers — Ford, GM, and Chrysler — struggled, Japanese automakers like Toyota and Honda surged. After World War II, Japan embraced quality management principles to keep costs down and efficiency up. With the guidance of American experts like W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, Japanese automakers focused on continuous improvement and defect reduction.

Foreign companies began to consistently outperform their American counterparts in quality rankings, customer satisfaction, and market share growth. In 1960, imports accounted for less than 5% of U.S. car sales. By 1971, they accounted for about 15%. By the 80s, foreign-made autos — mainly Japanese — reached over 30% of the U.S. market.

In 1981, Ford announced “Quality is Job 1” to counter growing foreign market share and signal a change in its approach to manufacturing and customer satisfaction. Leadership saw it as a way to win back the market. Initially, the campaign worked.

Ford invested heavily in quality control, new manufacturing techniques, and employee training, including hiring Deming, whose theories helped Japan excel. The company began to see product improvements and steady market share. For a time, Ford’s mandate for quality worked. By the late 90s, its stock price was at an all-time high; it looked like the company had engineered a miracle.

The popularity of trucks and SUVs in America gave executives and shareholders a false sense of security. American manufacturers like Ford were well-positioned to build and sell these kinds of gas-guzzling vehicles. Ford lost its appetite for quality reforms. In 1998, they stopped claiming that “Quality is Job 1.”

Safety issues immediately started plaguing the company, like the 2000 Firestone tire controversy that led to the recall of 13 million tires on Ford Explorers. Ford’s market share declined steadily throughout the 2000s and never recovered. The moral of the story is a fundamental question: can centralized quality mandates create long-term cultural change? Or are top-down mandates only as strong as the leaders that issue them?

What is centralized quality?

Ford’s story captured my attention because of what the company stands for. Henry Ford is credited with revolutionizing mass manufacturing to produce an affordable car for the middle class; in reality, many forces converged to bring the global economy to the precipice of modern mass manufacturing, and Henry Ford merely stepped through the door.

Before mass manufacturing, quality was implicit in commerce. Hand-made goods had to be just that — good — in order to sell. But mass production created a fundamental problem: when thousands of workers produce millions of identical items, individual craftsmanship becomes impossible. A single blacksmith could ensure every horseshoe met his standards, but how do you maintain quality when a hundred workers are stamping out identical parts on assembly lines? The scale that made products affordable also made quality control infinitely more complex.

In the early 20th century, management consultant and doubles tennis champion Frederick Winslow Taylor provided an answer. He believed enlightened managers could improve quality results in manufacturing through the design of workers’ conditions and the control of workers’ movements. At Bethlehem Steel, these methods increased pig iron throughput from 12.5 to 47 tons per day. Taylor’s insight was revolutionary: if you couldn’t rely on individual craftsmanship, you could engineer quality into the system itself.

Ever since then, we’ve lived in Taylor’s world. His scientific management spawned a century of sophisticated quality methods: Statistical Process Control in the 1920s, Total Quality Management in the 1980s, Six Sigma in 1986. Each approach shared a common thread: experts and managers direct quality improvements instead of depending on workers themselves.

The hallmarks of centralized quality

Centralized quality starts and ends with leadership-driven quality standards and reviews, where a single stakeholder reviews our work and decides whether it meets their standards. This has been the standard at every company I’ve worked with; design and engineering are both taught through critique and reviews from the earliest stages of production to the final delivery of a complete product. This approach can work brilliantly when executed with precision, but it creates a bottleneck: no matter how talented, a single person can only review so much.

Sometimes it’s not a single leader but an entire class of leadership that enforces quality from the top down. At Stripe, for example, we instituted a “walk the store” initiative that had leaders use the products their team shipped. For example, executives would regularly create a new Stripe account, set up the payments product, and schedule payouts to a test bank account; they’d score the overall quality of the product from their own experiences, and track improvements over time.

This program had good intentions, but because it was driven by leaders with strong opinions and biases, it often missed the point entirely. 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.

One way companies have tried to reduce the bottlenecks caused by leadership reviews is by creating specialized quality roles within the company. At one point in my career, QA teams were standard. They specialized in testing the team’s work, either manually or through automation, and reporting bugs and defects back to the team.

Apple employs thousands of QA specialists to test every aspect of its products, from hardware to software and user experience. In 2023, Apple staffed 12 times more workers on its iPhone assembly process than Google did for its Android phones. For their part, Google has invested heavily in software quality through dedicated roles on their “Engineering Productivity” team. From 2005 to 2012, Patrick Copeland (formerly head of testing at Microsoft) developed and grew the team to 1,200 engineers. Today, it has over 2,000.

With software companies touting a renewed focus on quality, will we see a rise of QA engineers? Already, engineers are having to devote more and more time to cleaning up low-quality vibe code created by AI. And what about QA designers or product quality specialists? In some ways, the rise of “design engineering” has been about quality and refinement of the end product.

Another symbol of the centralized approach to quality is quantitative performance metrics. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the hallmark of scientific management and the source of most modern organizational schemes. Teams pick measurable aspects of the product — number of defects, units produced, bugs fixed, subscriptions sold — set goals, and report progress. For my part, most of my design teams have been measured by these objective metrics, despite the reality that design is seldom reducible to a number. While it makes management feel more scientific, this quantitative approach is usually at odds with real users’ experiences, preferences, and expectations.

So goes the theory of centralized quality management. But does it work? I’ve researched dozens of companies that employ centralized quality management; initially, I assumed that most top-down quality mandates could be shown to be ineffective. But there are many success stories to learn from. In fact, most companies in the S&P 500 employ some form of centralized quality management. But within each case study were signs that the centralized approach was costly and fragile. Even more telling are the cases where centralized quality control was a core reason for a company’s downfall.

What does centralized quality look like?

Especially among designers, we love to valorize Steve Jobs for his philosophy on quality, because Jobs always expected the impossible. Take the original iPhone: when developing the phone’s screen, Jobs invited Wendell Weeks, the new CEO of glass manufacturer Corning, to Apple’s headquarters. He laid out his vision of strong, scratch-resistant glass, a sharp contrast to the cheap-feeling plastic that other phones used. Weeks revealed Corning had invented such a material (“Gorilla Glass”) in the 1960s but never found a market.

Jobs ordered all the Gorilla Glass Corning could produce in six months. But at the time, the company couldn’t produce any at all. Bootstrapping enough capacity to manufacture hundreds of thousands of phones was impossible — or so Weeks thought. Jobs was undeterred. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.” Weeks did just that. Corning scrambled to build brand-new manufacturing lines for Gorilla Glass, then met the iPhone’s demand. It banked record profits in 2007, and by 2010 Gorilla Glass was in 20% of cell phones worldwide.

I wish I could tell my stakeholders “don’t be afraid” whenever they question my decisions.

Steve Jobs presenting the first iPhone at MacWorld 2007 Blake Patterson

Jobs’s approach worked because Corning delivered. But in my experience, satisfying a visionary leader usually comes at a cost. That was true for Apple under Jobs; every significant decision filtered through layers of demonstrations and approvals. Teams demoed their work repeatedly to different managers, on up the chain, and ultimately to Jobs. With only one person capable of final judgment, teams often waited weeks for their audience with the CEO.

Leaders rarely want to be bottlenecks. So effective centralized quality management requires delegation. Delegation, in turn, requires accountability.

In my research, Jeff Bezos kept turning up as an example of accountability in centralized quality control. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos expected the impossible from those around him. In the late 90s, Bezos’s obsession with customer service put Amazon’s call centers in the crosshairs; his vision for Amazon’s customer service experience was no experience at all. “Every time a customer contacts us,” he said, “we see it as a defect.” If customers had to call, their questions should be answered quickly and thoroughly.

In 1999, Bezos tasked Bill Price with eliminating hold times. Price warned it was impossible: shorter calls meant inadequate solutions, forcing customers to call back, bogging down the system and increasing wait times. Bezos didn’t care. During a daily leadership meeting called the “war room,” he pointedly asked Price for an update on support wait times. Price claimed they were under a minute, and Bezos called his bluff by dialing Amazon’s help line on the conference room’s speakerphone. It took four and a half minutes to get an answer. Price was gone in ten months.

This sort of egomaniacal quality often causes leaders to become micromanagers. Like Elon Musk — his leadership of Tesla shows just how involved a top-down leader can get in day-to-day quality concerns. In 2018, with delivery numbers slipping, Musk needed to personally guarantee the assembly line’s quality, measured by its ability to churn out thousands of the company’s newest vehicles. As Tesla struggled to meet the demand for their Model 3, he made the Fremont, California factory his home. First, he slept on a couch, then on the floor. He spent time with workers, understanding the process, giving suggestions, and doing the work himself. “The reason people in the paint shop were working their ass off is because I was in the paint oven with them,” he told a Bloomberg reporter in 2018. Musk only left the factory when Tesla hit 5,031 Model 3s in a week. Behind him were employees “staring out into space like zombies” — the human cost of heroic leadership.

Even if you haven’t worked at Apple, Amazon, or Tesla, you’ve probably experienced centralized quality control. I’ve dealt with my fair share of self-styled visionary leaders demanding excellence, then micromanaging execution. But in my experience, this approach has a critical flaw: leaders can be wrong.

For example, take Jawbone, which suffered a cataclysmic crash due to its centralized style of quality management. In 2009, the company decided to bet on fitness trackers, building on early success with Bluetooth headsets. CEO Hosain Rahman demanded Jawbone’s first entry into the category — the Up band — be the smallest and most stylish device on the market. But cramming new hardware into tiny enclosures created manufacturing nightmares: in initial manufacturing efforts, the device’s electronics were destroyed when hot rubber was injected into the mold, and when devices broke, it was difficult to decipher the reason because the electronics were encased in rubber.

The Jawbone Up band

Despite more than 75 percent of prototypes failing after normal consumer use was simulated before launch, Rahman wouldn’t compromise on aesthetics. The Up band shipped with widespread defects. Jawbone raised $900 million trying to fix problems that persisted through three product generations. The company was liquidated in 2017. We can’t all be Steve Jobs.

So centralized quality management can, under the right circumstances, create excellence. And it can also, in the wrong circumstances, fail spectacularly. But there’s another, more resilient path — one where quality emerges from the product’s builders, not its managers. Unlike the centralized approach, this system is adaptable to change and empowers the people who implement it.

From centralized to decentralized

I’ve been amazed at the way that Microsoft has been able to completely reinvent itself over the past 20 years. It’s hard to believe the company that launched the Zune would not only catch up to Apple, but surpass it to become a leading innovator in the age of AI. Much of this is down to how they defined — then redefined — quality.

As Microsoft’s CEO, Bill Gates embodied centralized quality. A former Excel program manager described Gates reviewing his 500-page Visual Basic specification. He read every page, took detailed margin notes, and assaulted the team with technical questions. Co-founder Paul Allen called working with Gates ‘like being in hell,’ describing him as having an abusive personality who ‘thrived on conflict.’

Gates’s approach created a high-performance but punishing culture. His successor, Steve Ballmer, held the same beliefs about quality but lacked Gates’s technical instincts. By 2014, Microsoft had stagnated. Google dominated search, and Apple was the world’s most valuable company. Microsoft needed to change.

Satya Nadella flipped the script. Where Gates controlled every decision, Nadella empowered teams to drive quality. He eliminated the notorious “stack ranking” system that forced managers to rate employees against each other in zero-sum competition. Stack ranking was a core feature of Microsoft under Gates and Ballmer and a perfect distillation of centralized quality management.

Nadella’s empowerment approach fostered decentralized quality innovation. For example, a deaf Microsoft engineer named Swetha Machanavajhala independently developed background-blurring technology for Skype calls to help communicate with her parents in India. Instead of top-down mandates, Nadella’s culture empowered her to influence similar features for Microsoft Teams.

The annual “One Week” hackathon, started in 2014, exemplifies Nadella’s collaborative quality approach. In 2017, over 18,000 participants in 4,000 cities worked on projects outside their day jobs, generating innovations like Seeing AI and Xbox Adaptive Controller. This represents a complete philosophical shift from Gates’s controlled product development to employee-driven innovation.

David Golds, who left Microsoft in 2012 and returned in 2017, observed: “What changed was leadership, and everything followed from that. There was a tearing down of walls for software developers.”

By 2023, Microsoft’s stock had increased nearly tenfold in the nine years since Nadella became CEO, with a 27% annual growth rate, ending a 14-year period of near zero growth. Acquisitions like Mojang, LinkedIn, and GitHub, along with a deep partnership with OpenAI, show how Nadella sees innovation as a collaborative effort. Progress can come from anywhere, and in Nadella’s Microsoft, quality comes from the ground up.

Microsoft shows how reframing quality as a core responsibility of frontline workers can have an immediate and substantial impact on a company’s fate.

What is decentralized quality?

Decentralized quality means putting quality in the hands of workers, not managers.

Before Frederick Taylor’s scientific revolution, quality emerged organically. Medieval guilds controlled craftsmanship through apprenticeships. Masters passed knowledge to workers, who earned the right to guarantee their work. A blacksmith’s reputation hung on each horseshoe; a baker’s livelihood relied on tomorrow’s bread being as good as today’s. Quality wasn’t imposed; it was inherited, practiced, and owned by workers.

Taylor’s industrial efficiency swept away these traditions but preserved the essential truth: those closest to the work know how to improve it. Even as scientific management took hold, alternative voices emerged. In the 1920s, Mary Parker Follett argued for participatory leadership, where workers shape their own processes through what she called ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over.’

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth challenged Taylor’s centralized approach by emphasizing the psychological aspects of work and worker welfare. Lillian’s 1914 work The Psychology of Management argued that effective management required understanding ‘the effect of the mind that is directing work upon that work which is directed, and the effect of this undirected and directed work upon the mind of the worker,’ advocating for approaches that considered individual worker needs and job satisfaction alongside efficiency.

Cyclegraph of male drill press operator at New England Butt Co., undated. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Collection, Glass Stereo Slides (NMAH-AC0803-0000077) National Museum of American History

Decentralized quality inverts the traditional management hierarchy. Instead of executives defining standards and workers following them, frontline employees drive improvements. They identify problems, propose solutions, and implement changes. Leadership’s role transforms from commander to enabler, creating systems that empower workers rather than controlling them.

The hallmarks of decentralized quality

Even before writing this essay, I was well-aware of Toyota’s counterintuitive approach to building quality products.

At Toyota, quality is worker-driven. Each and every employee is responsible for the quality of the end result, no matter how small the part they play in its construction. This idea has caught on beyond manufacturing, too: 3M’s “15% time” policy allowed employees to pursue their own quality improvements and innovations, yielding breakthrough products like Post-it Notes and Scotchgard. Google’s version led to two of its most influential products, AdSense and Google Maps.

I’ve always liked Netflix’s worker-centric approach to quality. The company deliberately sabotages its own systems with tools like Chaos Monkey, which randomly shuts down servers during peak viewing hours. It’s strategic paranoia: by constantly breaking their own systems, Netflix engineers are forced to build services that can survive anything.

Another important aspect of decentralized systems is distributed ownership across the workforce, in contrast to concentrated quality control in inspection departments. For example, at Morning Star Company, the world’s largest tomato processor, there are no traditional managers or hierarchical structures. Instead, employees operate through “Mission Focused Self-Management,” where quality standards emerge from peer collaboration and individual accountability. Workers negotiate their responsibilities directly with colleagues and take full ownership of their part of the production process.

W. L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturer of Gore-Tex, operates on similar principles. The company organizes into small teams where every employee (called “associates”) has direct responsibility for product quality. The company’s lattice structure replaces traditional hierarchy with peer-to-peer accountability, resulting in some of the highest employee satisfaction and product quality ratings in manufacturing.

Distributed quality management is resilient; Morning Star and W. L. Gore have both stayed competitive because they are able to quickly adapt to evolving customer expectations and react to complex systems like global supply chain shocks and ecological extremes.

But decentralized quality isn’t just for manufacturing. During my time at the Wall Street Journal, I watched editors manage breaking news with a distributed quality system that would terrify most software companies. A hierarchy of editors pushed responsibility from editor-in-chief down to front-line desk editors to the individual reporters and journalists. The newsroom produced hundreds of stories every day, breaking news where minutes mattered. A daily coordination meeting was all the newsroom needed to stay in sync. Yet the Journal maintained an astronomical quality bar for writing, reporting, and fact-checking. The secret wasn’t heroic leadership. It was a system where standards propagated through culture, where desk editors had both the authority and accountability to make calls in real time.

Decentralized quality thrives on constant rapid feedback. As a designer, I’m deeply aware of the value of timely feedback. And at the most creative companies in the world, feedback is a full-contact sport. Pixar, for example, developed the “dailies” process, based on the film industry norm of screening unedited footage with the crew at the end of a day of shooting. Pixar’s animation renders can take many hours to process, putting a huge amount of pressure on the team to deliver progress every single day; but showing work-in-progress creates immediate feedback loops to catch and address quality issues within hours, not months.

In my own work, I’ve used similar approaches like test-driven development and continuous integration. Code changes trigger immediate feedback — tests run, peers review, and systems provide instant quality signals. Problems surface instantly, not weeks or months later.

One of the most fascinating aspects of decentralized systems is that quality standards emerge organically based on experience and results instead of imposing rigid specifications from the start. Wikipedia demonstrates this principle at internet scale. Quality standards for articles come from community consensus, with experienced editors mentoring newcomers and collectively refining guidelines that shape the encyclopedia. Despite what my high school teachers told me, this has produced an encyclopedia that surpasses traditional ones in factual integrity and editorial rigor.

What does decentralized quality look like?

Back to Toyota: In 1966, the company installed a rope attached to a board of lights above the assembly lines in their Kamigo plant. Management gave workers a new responsibility: on spotting a defect, any worker should pull the rope, which would stop the line. The board would light up, a supervisor would come over, and the group would ask: “How can we fix this?” A simple experiment changed quality management forever.

The andon installed in Toyota's Kamigo plant in 1966 Toyota Motor Corporation

Toyota’s system inverted traditional quality management. While Ford drilled workers to always keep the line moving, Toyota empowered every employee to halt production for quality issues. Instead of hiding defects to avoid blame, workers were celebrated for surfacing problems before they reached customers.

Toyota’s andon system (named after a traditional Japanese lantern) made quality everyone’s responsibility. It instilled a culture where frontline workers felt safe to surface problems immediately, rather than letting defects pass down the line. Beyond andon, this philosophy of worker empowerment extends to Toyota’s kaizen culture of continuous improvement, which has generated over 2 million ideas from employees.

Like the auto market as a whole, Toyota and Ford have changed substantially since the 1960s. But the impact of a decentralized quality culture speaks for itself: in 2024, Toyota vehicles averaged $441 in annual repair costs compared to Ford’s $775, with 98 problems per 100 vehicles versus Ford’s 130.

When American automakers tried to copy the andon system in the 1980s, they failed. They couldn’t replicate the culture; workers at one GM plant were yelled at when they pulled the cord. The contrast shows that Toyota’s success wasn’t about a process or tool. It was a reimagining of the relationship between workers and quality.

The distributed philosophy of quality ownership isn’t limited to manufacturing. Valve Corporation embodies distributed quality in its unique management system; that is, no management system at all. Valve makes video games, manufactures a gaming console, and maintains one of the largest games distribution platforms. They do this all while operating as a “flat” organization, meaning no bosses and no hierarchy, just employees choosing projects and forming temporary teams around shared interests. Workers literally roll their desks to different parts of the office when they want to join a new project. Unsuccessful initiatives lose people until there’s no one left to work on them.

The results speak for themselves. Valve’s 43 first-party titles average 83/100 on Metacritic, with the Portal series achieving a 98.7% positive review rate and selling 28 million copies. Steam, Valve’s game distribution platform, has captured 75% of the PC gaming market and generates over $10 billion annually. At $3.5 million in revenue per employee, Valve outperforms Apple, Google, and Facebook in per-capita productivity.

At Valve, quality emerges organically. Bad ideas can’t attract talent, while promising projects draw the company’s best. Marketing director Doug Lombardi explains: “Nobody writes a design doc and hands it to somebody… It’s the teams coming up with ideas and pushing in directions they want to take the product.”

Sometimes decentralized quality wins in unexpected ways. When James Daunt became CEO of Barnes & Noble in 2019, the chain was hemorrhaging money and closing stores as Amazon dominated book sales. Instead of doubling down on centralized efficiency, Daunt did something counterintuitive: he gave local employees control over their inventory, displays, and community programming.

Now, store managers could choose books they knew would sell, instead of mindlessly following corporate dictums. They organized poetry readings that drew neighbors, book clubs tailored to local interests, and author events that reflected their community. The corporate office, which had previously micromanaged everything from shelf placement to promotional calendars, stepped back.

Book return rates fell from around 70% to under 10% as stores aligned stock with local demand. The company now opens dozens of new stores annually, defying predictions of its inevitable demise. Meanwhile, Amazon has closed all 68 of its physical bookstores. Their centralized approach created “jumbled assortments of random stuff” that failed to capture the human connections that Barnes & Noble’s empowered employees provide. In bookstores, local knowledge triumphs.

These stories share a common thread: organizations that trusted their frontline workers to identify and solve quality problems. But decentralized quality has its own vulnerabilities. Valve’s radical structure has been criticized for creating informal power hierarchies and making it difficult to coordinate large projects. Some ex-employees describe a “high school clique” atmosphere where popular workers accumulate influence while others struggle. Without traditional management oversight, initiatives can moulder, or veer in directions that don’t serve broader company goals.

Still, these examples show a different path for achieving quality, where excellence is defined in the course of building a product. Unlike centralized approaches relying on visionary (but fallible) leaders, decentralized systems are resilient to individual failures, adaptable to change, and empowering to builders. The andon cord, the rolling desk, and the local bookstore manager each represent a small bet on human judgment over institutional control. Those bets look like they’re paying off.

The end game of distributed quality

I’ll leave you with an example of how far decentralized approaches can go: LEGO.

If quality management exists on a continuum, one end is the centralized approach of visionary leaders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Creating breakthrough products in centralized systems of quality takes determination and relentless standards. Moving away from this extreme, companies like Toyota, Valve, and Barnes & Noble distribute authority to frontline workers, creating resilient systems that don’t depend on individual genius. At the far end lies LEGO’s approach: quality baked so deeply into the product that it requires no human judgment at all.

LEGO bricks imported from Switzerland in 1957 Rathfelder

LEGO’s quality practice pushes decentralization to an extreme. Every brick made since 1949 must fit with every other brick ever made — this interoperability requires a manufacturing tolerance of 0.002 millimeters, meaning bricks can’t differ by more than 1/25th the width of a human hair. Manufacturing with these tolerances at such a massive scale is extraordinary: LEGO produces 36 billion bricks annually, or about 1,140 parts every second.

LEGO doesn’t need dedicated quality control specialists to decide if a part meets its standards: my 3-year-old son can tell the difference between a LEGO set and a cheap imitation.

In the digital world, we can steal glimpses of ultimate decentralization. The internet itself is founded on decentralized, failure-tolerant protocols that allow vast amounts of data to flow across the globe without a loss of quality. But for most companies, achieving fully decentralized, systematic quality remains an aspiration.

From slogans to systems

I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.

Centralized quality just doesn’t last. It relies on the willpower of leaders, on slogans and dashboards that fade when the room changes. Decentralized quality is harder to build, but it compounds: every frontline decision, every local improvement, every user-validated feature adds to a system that grows stronger over time.

LEGO gives us an extreme to shoot for: quality so deeply embedded that even a toddler can recognize it. Software can, and should, work the same way.

The next era of great products won’t come from heroic leaders demanding quality. It will come from companies that trust their builders, trust their systems, and trust their users to see and feel quality for themselves. The future belongs to those brave enough to decentralize.