Creating Quality-centric Products and Organizations

Congratulations - you’ve created a great product market fit, the first version is out! Now how do you make it a stellar quality, globally loved, market-winning product, and sustainably so?

Creating a high quality product and a quality-centric organization sound simple but it is amazing how many organizations struggle to achieve this goal especially making this a sustainable element in their products and organizational culture.

At Google TV and throughout most of my career, I have had the opportunity to build consumer products at global scale across media, security, search, cable provisioning and personal services such as mail and web hosting.?

Be it building one of the early DHCP cable self-provisioning service back on my first job at Excite@Home or Yahoo website or geocities a little later, or working on global streaming services such as Netflix, TV Platforms such as at Roku, one key characteristic that stood out for me is how critical quality, as perceived by the user, is for a product to be loved and a business to be successful.?

This becomes even more core for sustainable success, once you’ve established the product market fit, as users stay sticky and keep coming back to products they perceive are high quality as they are a pleasure to use regularly.

And a big part of ensuring your product reaches the right stellar quality levels (and stays there!), are what I call the three D’s - Definition, Data and Drive.

So let’s take these one by one.

Definition, simply put, is defining what quality means to your users and how you’re going to achieve it. It is important for anyone on the team to clearly understand and internalize this so they can effectively apply on their day-to-day jobs when making small or large decisions.

This involves a few key steps:

• Build User Expertise & Empathy - engage early, often and regularly with your users to know what they think of as quality and what quality they associate with your product
• Create measurable goals around quality - remember that to a user quality could be just the satisfaction levels in how helpful or delightful the product itself is or the more traditional quality elements such as reliability, accuracy or performance.
• Have a clear assessment of where you are in achieving these goals, high level path and next steps to get there
• Define top priorities based on highest impact on quality
• Define the right actionable metrics and processes to constantly stay on top of these, react quickly and continue to push the needle forward

Data - measuring and constantly watching the right data is critical to achieving predictable, sustainable quality results

• Ensure you have the right organizational set up to implement data collection, processing, reviews and action
• Clearly visualize and influence change to move to a data-driven culture in the organization if one doesn’t already exist
• Bring the right talent and give them solid levels of freedom to implement solid data platforms
• Ensure there are easy ways to leverage data and iterate constantly and quickly throughout the development lifecycle of your product releases.

Drive - this is the “making it happen” part.

A few key things here:

• Establish the right priorities, make tough calls if needed
• Establish the right processes to catch early and address quickly throughout development
• Establish the right incentives & rewards for quality to matter to everyone on the team
• Hire (or replace) so you have the right people in the right roles to influence quality
• Ensure teams learn constantly from any quality gaps - create a drive and blameless culture for continuous improvement
• Constantly move the needle on quality, and celebrate milestones and recognition along the way

That’s it! Now you are well on your way to build and scale a product that is inseparably tied to quality in the minds of your users.

Onwards and upwards!