The Day You Stopped Making Compromises on Product Quality
The Day You Stopped Making Compromises on Product QualityWhy product quality matters and how you can make it a priority in your companyDear subscribers, When was the last time that you shipped a product that you were truly proud of?
This is a tragedy because users don’t care if you hit your date or moved a metric. Instead, the best product builders that I’ve worked with all cared deeply about crafting a quality product that truly exceed user expectations. So today, I want to explore:
What is a quality product?To me, a quality product has three traits:
Here are some examples of quality brands and products:
Why it’s so hard to craft a quality product?I think partly why the data driven development is to prevalent is because it's simple. It's easy to ask someone to deliver x% increase in y%.
It's a harder leadership challenge set a vision and ask for high quality. There is not great objective measure, it's mostly subjective.… https://t.co/tMzZWn14Sp With a few exceptions, I think it actually gets harder to craft a quality product as a company becomes more successful. This is because:
Steve Jobs summarizes it well in this clip: How can you make quality a priority?The more experienced I get as a product manager, the more I care about quality. If you feel the same way, here are few ways to make quality a priority: 1. Join companies that succeed or fail based on qualityFor example, when Rahul co-founded Superhuman (the email app), he deliberately picked an industry where quality mattered: My deliberate decision with Superhuman was to pick an area, industry, and product where [craft] is a competitive advantage. High craft doesn't matter for a lot of things. High craft matters for a productivity tool that you'll spend hours using. It matters for something that costs $30 a month while the next best thing [Gmail] is free. Another example is Linear which competes with JIRA by crafting a simpler, faster, and more streamlined experience. So when deciding which company to join, use the company’s products and watch videos of the company’s product leaders. Does quality jump out as a priority? 2. Force yourself and your team to feel the user’s pain everydayIf users are shouting at you everyday to improve quality, then it becomes much harder to ignore them. There are two great ways to feel the user’s pain:
3. Make quality a core principle for your teamIn every product team that I’ve worked on, I’ve always had this principle:
I bring this principle up on a regular basis when making decisions to hold myself and everyone else accountable for quality. 4. Hire people who care about qualityTry to tease out whether someone cares about quality during the interview process:
5. Encourage your team to be proud of their craftIt feels great to be known in your company as the team that ships the highest quality products. Prioritizing quality isn’t easyCrafting a quality product often requires making hard trade-offs like:
None of these decisions are black and white, of course. But life is too short to ship subpar products. I’ll leave you with this Steve Jobs quote that beautifully sums up why quality matters: Further reading:
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