The Day You Stopped Making Compromises on Product Quality

Why product quality matters and how you can make it a priority in your company

Apr 12, 2023

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Dear subscribers,

When was the last time that you shipped a product that you were truly proud of?

Too many PMs focus only on launch dates and metrics to measure success.

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?
Why is crafting a quality product so hard?
How can you make quality a priority?

What is a quality product?

To me, a quality product has three traits:

Focused: It should be best-in class at delivering a singular value prop.
Delightful: It should exceed user expectations by paying attention to every detail.
Emotional: It should go beyond functional needs to create an emotional bond with the user.

Here are some examples of quality brands and products:

Apple: Jobs was famous for obsessing about every detail.
Linear: Linear’s principles extend to both its products and marketing pages.
OG Instagram: Simplicity and focus were core values of the founding team.

Why it’s so hard to craft a quality product?

Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen

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:

Quality is hard to measure. Unlike adoption metrics, quality is subjective. Often, the easiest way to move metrics is to show a crappy product to more people.
Quality is hard to incentivize. PM and engineering career ladders incentivize hitting launch dates, moving metrics, and making stakeholders happy. These traits often work against taking a risk to ship something truly innovative.
Quality is hard with too many cooks in the kitchen. As a company gets larger, you have to make trade-offs with other teams that often compromise quality. It’s all too easy to just ship the org chart.
Quality is hard with MVP and iterate culture. Too often, “let’s just test it” becomes an excuse to do what designer Stammy calls “Shiterate.”
Quality is hard without ownership. Quality often requires doing painful manual tasks like resolving UX bugs and deprecating features.

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 quality

For 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 everyday

If 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:

Create a user community. Establish a casual environment where users feel comfortable sharing their pain points with you. See my guide.
Become the user. Decline meetings for a whole day and force yourself to use your own product as a new user.

3. Make quality a core principle for your team

In every product team that I’ve worked on, I’ve always had this principle:

Craft matters: We will go the extra mile to ship a delightful experience.

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 quality

Try to tease out whether someone cares about quality during the interview process:

When they’re explaining their biggest accomplishment, do they mention quality and user delight? Or do they only focus on moving metrics?
When they’re doing a product case, do they talk about how they might exceed user expectations? Do they mention the emotions that they want users to feel?

5. Encourage your team to be proud of their craft

It feels great to be known in your company as the team that ships the highest quality products.

Prioritizing quality isn’t easy

Crafting a quality product often requires making hard trade-offs like:

Missing a launch date or a goal metric to ship a delightful experience.
Pushing back on an exec’s asks because you think it’ll compromise quality.

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:

Creator Economy by Peter Yang