What does it actually take to build a workplace with real substance, a place that does work of genuine height and quality? We sat down with Johanna Herrlander at Strawbay to talk about craft, care, and what it means to take pride in work that holds.
The Swedish word “verkshöjd” is hard to translate. It points to work that has real height to it, made with skill and care, the kind of thing you can stand behind. For Johanna Herrlander, that idea is less a slogan and more a daily practice, something you feel in how a team hires, how it ships, and how it treats the people doing the work.
We started with the most basic question: where does substance come from? Her answer began, unsurprisingly, with people.
“You cannot bolt quality on at the end. It starts with who you bring in. We hire for craft and for care, people who genuinely want the thing they build to be good, not just done. When someone takes that kind of pride in their work, you do not have to manage the quality into it. It is already there.”
Johanna Herrlander, Chief People & Organisation Officer, Strawbay
That care, she argues, only thrives when people are trusted to own their work. At Strawbay the teams are deliberately small, and they ship. Autonomy is real, but it comes paired with responsibility rather than instead of it.
“Autonomy without responsibility is just chaos, and responsibility without autonomy is just stress. We try to give people both at the same time. A small team that owns a problem end to end will care about it in a way no one can mandate from above. They feel it when something is not right, and they fix it because it is theirs.”
Johanna Herrlander, Chief People & Organisation Officer, Strawbay
None of that works, she is quick to add, without safety. People only do their best work when they can say “I am not sure”, ask the naive question, or admit a mistake without bracing for a reaction. For Johanna, psychological safety is not a soft extra. It is the condition that makes craft and honesty possible in the first place.
“The teams that ship the best work are the ones where it is safe to be wrong out loud. If people are afraid, they hide problems, and hidden problems are the expensive ones. When it is safe to say ‘this part worries me’, you catch things early, and you keep learning instead of defending.”
Johanna Herrlander, Chief People & Organisation Officer, Strawbay
That learning culture, she says, is what keeps substance from going stale. The point is not to know everything, but to stay curious and to get a little better with each thing you build. And it all comes back to a quiet kind of pride: building things that hold, that do not fall over the first time real volume hits them.
The reward, in the end, is something a customer can feel without ever seeing the team behind it. Integrations that stay stable, flows that keep running, onboarding that just works. Substance is not something you talk about. It is something that shows up, quietly, in work that holds.