Making the Case for Quality as a Business Strategy

The Situation

Campaign Manager had a UX debt problem, and it was costing the business.

The product had been built during an era when LinkedIn's flagship was Talent, Media, and Recruiting. Marketing Solutions was growing fast — 43% year over year at one point — but the experience was still organized around a bundling model designed for high-spend clients running million-dollar-plus campaigns. As the business shifted toward self-serve and a broader customer base, those legacy patterns didn't translate. Navigation was confusing. Workflows were inconsistent. Customers were hitting friction in places that should have been straightforward, and the accumulation of years of feature shipping without a cohesive experience strategy was showing.

The numbers told the story. New customers had an 80% drop-off rate before completing their first campaign. Even those who made it through had to wait roughly two weeks before seeing any results — an eternity for someone trying to evaluate whether the platform was worth the investment. And the features that actually drove success — tracking and audience tools — had low adoption because the onboarding experience didn't surface them effectively. Customers weren't failing because the product lacked capability. They were failing because the experience wasn't guiding them to the value.

The business hypothesis was clear: if we invested in the core user experience — cleaning up the debt, consolidating patterns, and creating coherence — it would solve the usability issues customers complained about most and be a massive unlock for future growth, particularly with the self-serve segment. But proving that required making quality visible in a way the organization couldn't ignore.

The tension was real. Product owners were incentivized around revenue potential and feature velocity. With the business growing that fast, the default instinct was to keep shipping and keep the lights on. Quality versus speed was a constant negotiation. And because functional areas often operated in silos, individual teams would ship features that made sense in isolation but created design and engineering debt across the broader experience. A PM might launch something with clear short-term upside, but the downstream impact — an inconsistent pattern here, a redundant flow there — compounded over time.

Design was uniquely positioned to see this. We had a cross-product view that no single PM or engineering team had. We could see what needed to be consolidated, what was creating confusion, and where holding off on a new feature would actually serve the customer better than shipping it. But having that view and getting the organization to act on it were two very different things.

The Approach

The opportunity came when a broader quality initiative surfaced across LinkedIn. The core flagship product had a top-down ask to identify and fix quality bugs across the app. Our context in Marketing Solutions was different — we weren't just dealing with bugs, we were dealing with systemic experience debt — but I recognized this as a moment to show that quality in our world wasn't a black box to be solved in isolation.

The team ran a comprehensive audit of the Campaign Manager experience. We documented over 100 cases of UX issues — inconsistent patterns, confusing navigation, redundant workflows, legacy interactions that no longer matched how customers actually used the product. This wasn't a theoretical exercise. Every issue was grounded in what we saw users struggling with and what the data showed.

At the same time, we partnered with the Product Operations team, who had their own list: a top 50 of the most common customer complaints and pain points they'd heard directly from the field. By combining what we'd identified from the design side with what Product Ops was hearing from customers, we created a unified picture that was hard to argue with. This wasn't design's opinion versus product's roadmap — it was a shared body of evidence.

From there, we partnered with product leaders who were equally passionate about what could happen if we invested in the core experience instead of just layering features on top. Together, we didn't just raise the issue — we built a strategy document that mapped the quality gaps to business opportunity areas. We showed what the experience could become if we slowed down shipping and invested in coherence.

Then came the moment that changed the trajectory. We presented the full picture — the audit findings, the Product Ops data, the strategy, and the business case — in front of the entire 700+ person global LinkedIn Marketing Solutions organization. We made quality visible. We showed what it looked like, what it was costing, and what we could gain.

We were heard. And momentum built.

The Impact

The presentation and the work behind it led to structural changes in how the organization operated:

A dedicated quality track was added to planning.** Quality was no longer a side project or something designers advocated for between sprints — it was an official investment area aligned to business opportunity.

• A foundational research mandate was established.** Our research team now had a quarter-long track dedicated to the opportunity areas we'd identified, giving us the evidence base to make informed decisions rather than reacting to the loudest request.
• VP-level visibility and prioritization.** Leadership across product and engineering were now dialed into where we were spending time. Projects that didn't contribute to business line goals and quality initiatives were deprioritized — a meaningful shift from the previous default of "ship everything."
• Cross-functional alignment around experience debt.** The partnership with Product Ops created a shared language between design, product, and customer-facing teams. Quality conversations went from "design thinks this needs work" to "here's what customers are telling us and here's what the data shows."
• A foundation for the self-serve transition.** By investing in the core experience, we removed the friction that was blocking the broader customer base from succeeding on the platform — directly supporting the business model shift from high-spend bundling to accessible self-serve.
• A redesigned Campaign Manager home experience.* The quality investment directly informed the new Campaign Manager home — a centralized experience that onboarded new customers, surfaced insights on their active campaigns, and provided a streamlined path to set up website tracking code so they could unlock deeper performance data. This addressed the core drop-off problem head-on: instead of leaving customers to figure out the platform on their own, the new home guided them to value.

Reflection

This case study taught me that quality is a leadership argument, not a craft argument. Designers often frame quality in terms of pixels, consistency, and polish — and those things matter — but they don't move an organization. What moves an organization is connecting quality to business outcomes: showing that experience debt has a cost, that customer complaints map to churn risk, and that investing in coherence unlocks growth.

The key was making it undeniable. Documenting 100+ issues wasn't about creating a backlog — it was about creating evidence. Partnering with Product Ops wasn't just collaboration — it was building a coalition. And presenting to 700+ people wasn't just a presentation — it was a commitment device. Once the organization saw it, they couldn't unsee it.

I also learned something about the tension between quality and speed that I think gets oversimplified. It's not that PMs don't care about quality — it's that incentive structures and organizational silos make it rational to ship first and fix later. Blaming partners for that dynamic doesn't help. What helps is contextualizing it, showing the cumulative impact, and creating a structure where quality has its own space in the roadmap rather than competing with every feature request.

The lesson: don't wait for permission to make the invisible visible. Build the evidence continuously, so when the moment comes, you're ready.