10 Proven Tactics to Elevate Product Quality
Life's too short to "shiterate" on products that nobody wants
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share 10 proven tactics to elevate product quality.
Life's too short to "shiterate" on products that nobody wants.
Let’s talk about how you can avoid this by crafting quality products and teams that give a damn.
Crafting quality products
1. Build with community from ideation to launch
Over the weekend, Marques Brownlee shared this video with his 19M followers:
It was his review of Humane’s AI pin — a beautiful device that doesn’t seem to have much utility at all. Before launching, the Humane team built the product in stealth for 5 years. I believe that:
Most products shouldn’t be built in stealth with a big reveal at the end.
Instead, it’s almost always better to build with the community from ideation to launch.
Building with the team and internal experts is common. But many people don’t build with customers until the product is ready to ship.
Avoid this mistake. Loop in customers from the very beginning:
Invite target customers to join your community before you build the product.
Share updates regularly from roadmaps to designs to working prototypes.
Solve problems together with both teammates and customers.
Being able to talk to customers anytime you get stuck on a problem internally is a game changer. 9 out of 10 times the answer becomes obvious immediately after.
2. Recognize that beauty enhances utility
Product Quality = Utility + Beauty
You need both utility and beauty to make customers fall in love with your product. Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) explains it well in this clip:
My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things…what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared.
Making something useful is table stakes in many competitive markets. It’s beauty that transforms a useful product into a memorable and emotional experience.
3. Launch the product into concentric circles
It’s almost always a bad idea to launch a new product to everyone right away.
Instead, launch it in concentric circles and raise the quality bar each time:
Team test to work out any major bugs or issues.
Employee alpha to get signal from people who are unfamiliar with your product.
Customer beta to get feedback from real users.
Full launch to get scaled feedback and deliver fast follows.
This is the same process used by product teams like Linear to elevate quality. It’s such an obvious way to increase quality yet many teams still risk going straight to full launch.
4. Don’t lose sight of the core loop
In gaming, a core loop is the actions that users repeat in your game the most often (e.g., explore area → fight monster → buy upgrades).
It's the heart of the game that everything else revolves around.
The same concept applies to tech products: