Every four years, certain odd traditions happen. The Olympics. Leap Days. Vancouverites attempting to pick their top 10 Council candidates out of 56 randomly sorted names, 20 of whom are for parties that never previously existed.

Yes, it’s true: this October, Vancouver votes.

Since Oct 3 until Sat Oct 17, Vancouverites have been choosing a Mayor and Council. And since there’s a BC provincial election the following week, things are even noisier than usual.

Time for another election guide.

Okay, so what’s the story again?

Last election, Sim and his newly-formed center-right ABC party swept into power.

While the voters who showed up last time clearly supported Sim – all 7 ABC candidates topped the Council votes, and it wasn’t even close – fragmented opposition turned his win into a landslide. Seemingly-viable progressive parties ran 19 candidates for only 10 council seats, and naturally got their asses handed to them by a united center-right.

Four years later, ABC has shifted rightward and gone from promising new party to the folks we can blame for any given issue the city still has. Meanwhile, the main progressive parties are only running 13 candidates across 10 seats. This time, things will be closer.

What are the issues?

You will be shocked to learn that the biggest issues are housing, safety, and affordability.

For context: City government is primarily responsible for our surroundings. Housing approvals (or rejections). Local streets. Water and sewer, parks and libraries, fire and police. You know, the stuff immediately around you.

Is the City in charge of social services? No, that’s the province. How about sparking new world orders? No, that’s the Prime Minister.

Now, some responsibilities awkwardly straddle levels of government. For example, mental health and substance use is nominally a provincial issue, but affects cities acutely. Climate change uncomfortably belongs to no level of government in particular. So, that’s a thing.

But for the most part, Mayor and Council’s 11 equal votes only decide policy and spending at the local-environs level. So that’s where we’ll focus today.

The biggest issues this election are:

• Safety. For some, this means cracking down on street disorder and policing of drug use. For others, it means improving pedestrian, driver, and cyclist safety.
• Development. More homes are being completed than in 2022, but with current zoning and construction costs, the city is unlikely to meet its housing completion targets. There is disagreement on how urgent an issue this is.
• Affordability. ABC set this year’s tax increase for property owners at 0%, and home prices have cooled in recent years. But about 55% of Vancouverites are renters, whose costs have continued to climb – and a freeze in new supportive housing units is divisive.
• Infrastructure. Most parties seem to support investment in pools and community centres, but funding and implementation visions differ.
• Ken Sim. He’s been Mayor for 4 years. Whatever problems he hasn’t fixed – even if they’re decades-old – are now top of mind.

Often it’s been helpful to think of Vancouver parties in terms of both traditional left vs. right politics, as well as how they think about city development.

Urbanists generally support a denser, less car-oriented city. This means permitting more homes and shops and helping them actually get built, but also investing in the city’s walking and cycling infrastructure. OneCity is Vancouver’s most prominent urbanist party, while mayoral candidate Pete Fry and his Green party seem to have adopted certain urbanist policies over the years, making them potential allies.

Conservationists, by contrast, support protecting existing city character such as street parking, older rental stock, and single-family density. They typically support procedure and consultation to protect tenured residents from change. ABC and COPE have some of these tendencies (albeit mostly conserving different things), with TEAM the undisputed maximal conservationalist party.

Left-wing parties tend to favour progressive social and fiscal policies. At the city level, this might mean supportive housing, prioritizing harm reduction over policing drug use, and prioritizing renters over landowners. OneCity and the Green party are center-left parties, while COPE is very distinctly a leftist party.

Right-wing parties, in the Vancouver context, tend to prioritize law and order and maintaining our famously low property taxes, with more focus on landowners’ rights. Since the governing ABC’s shift slightly more right, they’ve spawned two more-centrist splinter parties (the Vancouver Liberals and Vote Vancouver).

Okay, but what’s the deal with all these parties?

Okay, it’s a lot, but. As far as I can tell, there are about 2 candidates who could win the Mayoralty, and about 4 parties in contention for Council seats.

If you like the idea of researching every party and voting with your heart, that’s defensible. Or if you want your Council ballot ticks to avoid the fate of the 34% in 2022 that didn’t even go to a top-20 candidate, you can vote strategically.

Either way, you get one vote for mayor, and 10 for Council. Here’s an outline of each party, with a mind to what makes them different, sorted very roughly from most-incumbent to most-newcomer.

• ABC and Ken Sim
• Green and Pete Fry
• OneCity
• COPE
• Vote Vancouver
• Parties without sitting Councillors
  • Vancouver Liberals
  • TEAM
  • The Rest

ABC and Ken Sim

After winning a strong majority on Council in 2022, ABC got to work, hiring the promised 100 police officers and cutting permitting times. While the increase in housing starts was closer to 20% than the promised 200%, these, combined with approvals that the previous council had made and macroeconomic changes, helped Vancouver’s out-of-control housing prices behave less stupidly than usual during ABC’s term.

Reflecting ABC’s rightward shift between their 2022 campaign and today, the campaign promises Sim did not meet are mostly of the progressive/urbanist type: planting 100,000 trees, hiring 100 mental-health nurses, and adding 5,000 daycare spaces.

Despite mostly doing as he’d said, however, Ken Sim seems relatively unpopular. Without in-depth polling it’s hard to tell why exactly – it could be the cuts he made to hit ABC’s headline 0% tax increase, their freeze on new supportive housing units, cutting the City’s Renters’ Office, or calling Bitcoin “the greatest invention ever in human history” and insisting this was “a hill I’m willing to die on.”

Soon after ABC expelled its Councillor Rebecca Bligh for opposing priorities like re-allowing natural gas heating in new construction, or the supportive housing freeze, ABC suffered a horrific by-election showing. Since then they’ve made some pivots – now Sim seems to talk less about Bitcoin, and more about public safety.

Likely as a side effect of this more-conservative shift, ABC has earned two splinter parties this election: the Vancouver Liberals led by their former Chief of Staff, and Vote Vancouver led by Bligh. While it’s not clear either has a chance to win seats, the Liberals in particular may sap enough ABC votes to cause trouble.

For 2026, ABC’s two signature campaign pledges are to “ban open-air hard drug use”, which is already illegal but certainly might see more police attention, and to lobby the province to establish 100+ involuntary care beds in Vancouver for substance use and mental health disorders. Perhaps hoping to get out the vote, ABC has used their Council majority to add these two campaign promises as non-binding plebiscite questions to the ballot.

And on transportation, they’ve shifted substantially from a 2022 promise to reduce reliance on motorized vehicles to voting against bike lanes on Broadway, and pledging to remove inexpensive traffic-calming measures in residential neighbourhoods.

Beyond that, ABC’s platform one-pager is easier to digest than other parties’, and the three headlines give the vibe: “Public Safety & Addressing Street Disorder”, “Affordability & Accountability at City Hall”, and “Jobs & Economy”. While affordability is a headline, their primary mechanism for delivering this is another less-than-inflation tax increase for landowners in 2027.

There are a variety of policy differences between Ken Sim and his challengers, but his message has boiled down to a pretty timeless version of right-wing municipal politics: lower taxes, and get tough on disorder.

For voters who agree with ABC’s own Peter Meiszner, who was recently quoted saying violent crime “was at a 23-year low last year”, this focus on yet more policing may not be compelling. But those who agree with the wording of the plebiscite that Vancouver now has “unprecedented” levels of “disruption to community safety” may be inspired to back Sim again.

ABC is running a whopping 9 candidates for Council this year: incumbents Lisa Dominato, Sarah Kirby-Yung, Mike Klassen, Peter Meiszner, and Lenny Zhou, joined by new candidates David Grewal, Joyce Gillespie, Lorraine Lowe, and Arezo Zarrabian.

The Vancouver Greens and Pete Fry

Boosted by many years as a city Councillor, Pete Fry of the Green Party won the ad hoc agreement between the three main progressive parties to run a unified Mayor on Sep 8. Once that happened, Fry leapt into the lead. Not only is he the clear forerunner to defeat Ken Sim, polls from Justason, Canada Pulse, and Leger all show Fry in a consistent – if narrow – lead.

The Progressive Trio: Green, OneCity, COPE

While most progressives and urbanists will simply back the Greens’ Fry for Mayor, Fry voters also need to make 10 Council picks. In many cases, they’ll be picking from amongst the three main progressive parties:

• Green, with 4 candidates
• OneCity, with 5 candidates
• COPE, with 4 candidates

As it happens, these parties’ platforms mostly agree on a lot of issues. They all seek to:

• Add civilian responders for non-emergency street disorder
• Restore certain ABC city service cuts
• Reverse the supportive housing freeze, and support more rentals and co-op housing
• Re-establish the renter’s office and increase tenant protections
• Improve access to public washrooms
• Pursue electoral reform (sure would make writing these guides easier)
• Audit the Vancouver Police
• Make more investments in pools and community facilities
• Plant more trees
• Secure thousands more affordable homes, including on public land
• Expand childcare
• Improve cycling, walking, and bus infrastructure

That provides a substantial surface area for a Green/COPE/OneCity coalition to work together and pass policies. But exactly how progressive voters fill their Council ballots will depend less on whether they broadly support these initiatives, and more on who will:

1. Be electable
2. Have the best take on these and related issues
3. Get ‘er done

Okay, back to the Greens

While the 2026 Vancouver Green platform is extremely long, it has some interesting details and signature issues that distinguish them from COPE and OneCity.

On development, they’re distinctly more cautious than “YIMBY” voters might prefer, claiming the 2023 provincial housing targets are “impossible to meet”, proposing “pace of change” measures, and like most of Council they voted against the recent Villages plan (which had turned unpopular despite not being particularly aggressive in terms of upzoning.) Still, the Greens describe the importance of approving more affordable and “missing middle” housing. And their goal of converting 11% of Vancouver’s street surface to community use like parklets and active transit is distinctive and measurable.

On public safety, the Greens propose CROW, a non-police mobile service with a dedicated public phone number for non-emergency street disorder. They also highlight the street safety of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians – more Vancouverites die each year from traffic collisions than do from stranger attacks¹.

While the Vancouver Greens have long had a recognizable brand and relatively popular moderate-left views, they don’t always get the fired-up candidates and volunteers that fuel winning campaigns. While this may lead to progressive voters giving more picks to COPE or OneCity, the Greens are also liable to pick up votes from centrists that might have voted for ABC or TEAM last election, making the Sep 15 poll showing all 4 Greens in the top 10 a plausible future.

The Green slate for 2026 consists of filmmaker and VDLC-endorsed candidate Annette Reilly, former Park Board chair and urban farmer Camil Dumont, renters’ legal advocate Stephanie Smith², and hospitality worker Bridget Burns.

OneCity

Since 2018, OneCity has been the most prominent more-housing party in Vancouver.

Compared to other parties, they are more enthusiastic about permitting more homes of all kinds in all neighbourhoods – including supportive housing, co-ops, market rental, condos, low-rise, in-fill, and whatever else it takes to overcome the housing shortage.

While they broadly agree with the other progressive parties, OneCity’s priorities put them to the left of the Greens, and distinctly more urbanist than COPE.

While OneCity does have its own distinctive take, including progressive property taxation (wealthier landowners paying more) and exploring public ownership of the Mobi bike share, their biggest distinction from the other left-leaning parties is their enthusiasm for urban change and improvement.

To pick one small example of how this can play out, the Green platform pledges a moratorium on “micro-suites” – a rule that, since 2014, has allowed homes under 320 sq. ft. to be built in the DTES. OneCity would likely argue that banning tiny suites won’t cause larger homes to be built, simply leading to more people living in their vehicles, shelters, and the streets. The Greens and COPE would likely argue that we should somehow find some other way to fund larger homes for everybody.

All three have the same high-level goal – better and more available housing, a walkable and climate-resilient city – but OneCity has been the most willing to ruffle feathers to get it.

OneCity’s most prominent candidates are sitting councillor and former environmental lawyer Lucy Maloney, who is highly likely to be re-elected, and well-known civic journalist Frances Bula. They are joined by transportation planner Iona Bonamis, who nearly got elected in 2022, as well as lawyer for Indigenous governments Caitlin Stockwell, and Co-op Housing Federation director Jarrett Hagglund.

COPE

Since 1968, COPE has been Vancouver’s most prominent party for renter protections, unions, and good old-fashioned socialism.

While they support the shared progressive policies, they have their own distinctive take. Where OneCity is especially focused on creating new affordable housing, COPE is often most concerned with protecting existing affordable housing. Where NIMBY parties like TEAM generally oppose all development, COPE tends to oppose any development that would disadvantage an existing tenant.

Beyond this core value, the COPE platform is a more leftist and strident take on a progressive agenda for Vancouver. They have specific proposals to raise more revenue from the wealthy: taxing mansions, a land value tax³, and increasing the empty homes tax to 9% – plus taxing empty commercial and industrial property. They also have policy proposals like opening libraries 7 days a week, funding universal breakfast and lunch in Vancouver schools, and a public grocery pilot.

COPE’s current standard-bearer is sitting councillor Sean Orr, who topped the Sep 15 Justason poll in popularity. This election, they are also running transit organizer Solomon Yi-Kieran, climate researcher Devyani Singh, and food-security worker Chloe Leslie.

Vote Vancouver

First elected as Councillor with the NPA in 2018, Rebecca Bligh was first to leave in 2019 after that party’s board took an abrupt rightward swing. She then joined Ken Sim and some of the more moderate NPA Councillors to form ABC Vancouver, which got her re-elected in 2022. Then, apparently, history repeated when Bligh took issue with rightward ABC motions like re-permitting natural gas in new home builds, or freezing new supportive housing, culminating in her being expelled from ABC in 2025.

While it might seem Bligh would be more at home with the Green Party, after her previous conflicts one can hardly blame her for going her own way and forming Vote Vancouver. Unfortunately, so far her mayoral bid and six Council candidates have all polled in the single digits. I’ll update here if there’s indication of a momentum change in Vote Vancouver’s chances this election.

Vancouver Liberals

The Vancouver Liberals are a strange phenomenon. Political strategist Kareem Allam, Ken Sim’s former Chief of Staff, split with ABC acrimoniously in 2023. He then formed his own party and, in a stroke of marketing genius, chose the name “Liberals”. The popularity of the centrist federal Liberals and the past strength of the center-right BC Liberals make this an instantly recognizable brand for an unrelated but roughly centrist party in the City.

What’s more, Allam was able to recruit some notable Council candidates, including former BC Liberal MLA Moira Stilwell, VSB chair Victoria Jung, former NDP campaign manager Jessica Walton, and former NPA Park Board commissioner John Coupar. Allam also posted support numbers of 10%, 19%, and 6% in the most recent polls, which is not bad for somebody running a new party who has never held office.

Still, with a totally new party, no sitting Councillors, their Council candidates not having broken the top 20 in the polling, and no indication of a momentum change, all evidence points to the Vancouver Liberals being more of a spoiler for ABC than a real contender for 2026.

TEAM, Colleen Hardwick

During her term as NPA Councillor starting in 2018, Colleen Hardwick developed a reputation as a strident opponent of urban development. I mean, supporter of neighbours’ right to veto change in their backyards. When the NPA imploded, she spearheaded a new party, TEAM, to run for Mayor – holding the banner for those who think there is no housing shortage.

Hardwick earned just short of 10% of the mayoral vote that election, but she was undeterred. She ran to get her Council seat back in the 2025 byelection, but hardly got half the votes necessary to win. Since she’s been back on the mayoral ballot for 2026, polling seems to reinforce this picture – she has a small consistent base that does not seem to be expanding.

The TEAM platform is a good example of maximal conservationist thinking: it’s not just about preserving what’s already here, but also undoing the relatively modest zoning and planning reform that has been done in recent years. For example, a key goal is cracking down on multiplexes, which in their view allow too many homes, overly small front yards, and are insufficiently “neighbourly in form”? So, if you’re being terrorized by triplexes, maybe check out TEAM.

The Rest

An uncomfortable reality of Vancouver’s broken electoral system is that there are often so many candidates and parties that they can’t all get real coverage. When you get to new under-the-radar parties like Muhammad Ahmad’s new center-left Bright Future party or the mostly school-board-only TrueBlue party, there are no polling numbers to even quantify how much of a chance they don’t have of making it this election cycle.

Still! Participating in civic politics is a lot of work. Here’s to everybody who runs, and who put in the effort to try and make their city a better place.

Time to vote!

Since turnout is often low for municipal elections, your vote counts more! Plan your vote, and put a day in your calendar where you’ll have your say. With a BC election also inbound, voting early is especially appealing this year.

• Advance Voting: Sat Oct 3, Wed Oct 7, Sat Oct 10, Tue Oct 13
• Final Vancouver Election Day: Sat Oct 17, 2026

Go Further

Researching a vote for something so local can be tricky. Here are some starting points for going deeper.

• The City of Vancouver Election Website, including:
  • The City’s Voters’ Guide and Plan Your Vote tool
  • Their Candidate Guide, Mayoral candidates, and Council candidates
• Vancouver municipal journalist and local treasure Justin McElroy’s Bluesky feed
• CBC’s This is Vancouver podcast
• Other election guides
  • Issue by issue guides by local journalists Vancity Lookout
  • The Griffins’ Nest’s School Board candidate questionnaires
  • A housing questionnaire by the anti-multiplex Smart Density Vancouver
  • Canadian Veggie’s progressive urbanist candidate guide and quiz to see how your votes would compare to parties’
  • Side Street Vancouver’s voting compass on housing and taxation
  • Women Transforming Cities’ candidate commitments
  • The Vancouver and District Labour Council’s endorsed candidates
  • Vision Zero Vancouver’s 2026 Council report card on traffic safety issues
  • My own 2022 election guide, for reference and accountability
• The Tyee’s municipal coverage
• Polling references
  • Justason’s Sep 15 mayoral poll data and council poll data
  • Research Co.’s July–August poll
  • Pallas Data’s July poll
• Jens von Bergmann’s analysis of 2022 ballot patterns

Software has long been great at storing, retrieving, and sharing a company’s knowledge. This is most SaaS apps, from Slack to GitHub to Notion.

But as easy as it is to store information, it’s hard to measure its accuracy. Or gauge its importance. Or promptly act on it. Or extract useful observations from an ocean of disorganized crap. Thus, most information goes unused. Heck, most information goes unrecorded.

So it’s been for many years.

Agents on the brain

A big upshot of the past year’s tooling improvements is that more information is worth recording and acting on.

AI-native teams are shifting away from Notion and Google Docs, toward more agent-friendly formats like Markdown for their business’ docs. They’re storing more info in team-accessible locations, and using it to move faster with agents.

A key contributor to the growing hype around this shift is Y Combinator. With the release of gbrain, a number of talks on the topic, and Tom Blomfield’s entry in this summer’s Request for Startups, they’ve turned “company brain” from viral idea to overused buzzword before most people have even heard the term.

While different treatises on the subject will center different goals, the core idea is that companies should make as much information as is practical usable by their team’s agents, because this contributes to positive flywheel effects.

When a company’s decisions, processes, and proprietary info are legible to agents, they can of course help automate things. But they can also route information – leaders and ICs should be able to get the facts they need without going through lossy and slow layers of middle management. And agents fed with enough knowledge to form a “closed loop”, where observation, decision, and outcome are captured, can help run self-improvement – helping you hill-climb measurable aspects of a business.

Now this is all very good in theory, but currently tricky to implement without descending into some mix of dystopia and AI psychosis. As much as spelunking the Claudese docs of GBrain is interesting, it’s a bit early for you to adopt 1M lines of company-brain machinery that evolved to run a startup accelerator (unless, perhaps, you run a competing startup accelerator.)

However, as I’ve worked to build our team’s own post-Notion data bus and repository of truth, I’ve found a few emerging-consensus principles and techniques worth considering, for those of you working to get more use out of agents for non-coding work.

1. Text files, synced with history

Agents are really good at working with folders of text documents, so that’s the default approach. Then, you need a way to sync these documents with your team, track changes, and resolve conflicts, so – big surprise – the nerdy early adopters of this pattern are mostly using git repos.

On one hand, this is kind of silly. Git is a weird sync layer for a system where you’re mostly editing one file at a time, and always want to pull before any view or edit operation, and immediately commit and push your changes. And it doesn’t provide for realtime multiplayer editing, which you want during meetings and the like.

But also, git is simple. And well-understood. And it works.

GBrain has some intense scripts that coordinate its sync engine on top of git, but you can get started by just instructing your AGENTS.md to pull frequently, and to push every change it notices on disk immediately to GitHub – with human edits and agent edits pushed up as separate commits. ¹

One problem working with folders of Markdown documents – synced or not – is that there isn’t AFAIK a great app for browsing these. What you’d want is something where each window shows a folder, with the file structure on the left side and rendered-but-editable Markdown on the right. Given the git backend, you’d also want some hooks to fire pull and push events on open and save, as well as some way to do all this on your phone too.

The closest Mac app for this I’ve found so far is Obsidian². Using git as a backing store can be improved with plugins on Mac, but AFAIK working with git-backed Obsidian on mobile is still rough. You could probably use Obsidian Sync for a small team (max collaborators is currently 20) instead of git, with a different set of pros and cons.

2. Separate maintained truth from source data

A classic failure of documentation is that it can become unclear what is actively maintained and trustable, vs. what was a one-off capture of a discussion, idea, fact, or plan at some point in time. A lack of clarity here is even more disruptive to agents than it is to humans, since the docs are their memory.

It seems most company brain systems formalize this distinction. For our team’s brain repo we distinguish between “point-in-time” docs that were true (e.g. meetings, plans, decisions), and a much smaller set of “evergreen” docs that we continuously review and maintain (e.g. core strategy, policies, who are we building for). GBrain calls its analogous concepts “Timeline” and “Compiled Truth” docs respectively.

3. Rigorously track provenance

Keeping a partially agent-maintained knowledge-and-action system from descending into mush requires discipline about where purported facts were sourced from. If a document was hand-authored by your Founding Engineer yesterday, and today your CTO edited and approved it, that’s probably a reliable document. If Steve had Sonnet 4.5 barf a novel of “load-bearing” analysis that was “quietly” incorrect last fall, that’s probably worse than nothing.

A coherent company memory needs some kind of metadata – e.g. headers in your markdown files – that track document history and state. When was this drafted? Last reviewed? Overhauled? Sanity-checked? Who did so? Is this mostly AI speculation, or is it a specific human’s own thoughts and words?

One useful instruction is to have agents (and humans) ensure they link underlying sources for every claim, and prefer attributed quotes of specific humans over paraphrases. Each transformation of text is usually lossy, so minimizing this (and making claims more auditable) makes the system more stable and clear.

4. Be queryable

The more your agents can fetch, consider, and route your company’s ground truth, the less time your team will need to spend relaying info for one another – and the more you can spend building and solving problems.

This can start with automatically putting your routine internal meetings and Slack decisions³ into point-in-time Markdown docs in your company brain, but you can go way beyond that. Ad campaigns should create an artifact about what was tried and what was measured. Customer feature requests should be documented in a standard queryable format. Signed contracts, lost deals, feature launches, policy decisions, recruiting leads – any interesting event in your org can be recorded and made usable, informing future improvements. Heck, some teams even make their agents’ prompts and traces visible to one another, in real time.

Of course, all of this is easier if you have a transparent company culture. Orgs that can work mostly in the open, avoiding DMs and secret docs except for rare HR or legal issues, are getting leverage out of these tools faster than companies that live in a world of need-to-know. But as the tools evolve, it will get easier to leverage strictly permissioned data too.

5. Automatically improve

While it’s early days, some agentic workflows can now recursively self-improve with supervision. The more mature software factories detect, draft, and land fixes for issues in the software factory itself. GBrain has a complex “dreaming” loop that looks for conflicts, synthesizes reports, and connects items into a knowledge graph. Every product analytics suite from PostHog to Amplitude is now selling a “self-driving” product loop.

For now teams are experimenting and, naturally, not all self-improvement attempts immediately bear fruit. But ultimately, improvement is what we’re all after. This might mean faster decisions, clearer processes, simpler workflows, better products, more leads – if it’s part of your loop and you can measure it, it could be optimized.

And of course, what can be optimized will get over-optimized. At least at first.

Which brings us back to, as always, judgement. All these newfangled brains still need to serve the hearts.

However, the story goes, capitalism doesn’t value quality. Businesses don’t fund software that is lovable. Thus, you need to make a career choice: do you want to be a craftsperson, or do you want to make money?

This dichotomy is nonsense.

I mean, yes, these two things are in some tension. You can easily make money maintaining EOL plumbing if you can motivate yourself to do it well, and you can easily make beautiful products if you can afford to give them away for peanuts.

But there absolutely exist businesses that are very large and successful in part because they invest in quality. Beauty, speed, and user experience can drive profits.

Patrick Collison spoke about this back in 2023:

My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things, and for rational reasons. Because what does a beautiful thing tell you?

Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared. And you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only care about those and did everything else in a very slapdash way. …

If someone really convinced me that the financial returns to craftsmanship and beauty – which I believe are greater – are not greater, I’d still do it. Life’s too short.

So you could try working at Stripe.

Even within Stripe, however, there are products and areas that don’t justify the level of care Patrick describes here. To get a real mandate for quality – to do great work, and earn a good income doing it – you need to ask yourself a question: is there a business case for quality here?

If you want the resources necessary to build something well, then choose to work on things worth doing well.

Things Worth Doing Well

There are a lot of reasons a product could be worth doing exceptionally well. Here are some:

• The product is used often – by many people, many times a week
• The motion is product-led – people self-serve, and refer by word of mouth
• The focus is retention – customers will vote with their feet
• The customers have high LTV – each buyer could grow into a huge account
• The buyers are users – quality impacts the decision-makers themselves
• The users are demanding – developers, designers, and other prosumers

There are many others, but even just the above attributes describe some of the most craft-centric companies out there: Linear, Figma, Stripe, Wealthsimple, Apple, and so on. The economic details vary, but if a large company is spending the surprisingly large amount of resources it takes to build exceptional products, there’s a business reason to do so.

Meanwhile, many of the most slapdash products out there are the inverse of this dynamic: imagine an internal control panel that an enterprise contract obliges you to deliver. A project like that shouldn’t be laboured over – it should be built to a minimum reasonable standard, then shipped. Its primary success factor is to exist.

So if your goal is to work on things that are worth doing well, how do you figure that out a priori? You need to get a sense of the business. Who are the customers, what makes them buy, and what makes them stick around? If you want to build a company that can justify making great stuff, ensure that you’re in a market where quality can confer an advantage.

The analysis is a bit easier if you’re being recruited, since you can simply ask.

Back when I ran Steamclock, occasionally I’d be approached by a prospective client that wanted to make a delightful app (excellent, that’s what Steamclock is all about) but for a use case that seemed… peripheral. Maybe it was an occasional-use product, or perhaps it was an internal tool.

Sometimes it was plainly obvious that hiring an A-Team for the project was overkill, but other times, I’d explicitly ask:

Thinking about what success looks like, how much do UX and quality for this product contribute to the success of the business overall?

Sometimes they’d quickly realize it was a bad fit. But other times, they’d make a compelling economic case for craft and UX – starting us off on the right foot to execute on that vision.

At the end of the day, there are countless ways to make a career building great software. The important thing to remember is that it’s not enough to care deeply about craft. It’s a great start, but if your customers won’t actually reward quality, you’ll be running uphill.

Instead, work on products that have a business case for craft. You’ll have a durable mandate to do great work – and make money doing it.