Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Anthony Stevens
Quality is a funny characteristic. It requires constant attention to maintain it. Even then, there’s no guarantee that some unknown, systemic problem might crop up just when you least expect it.
Toyota’s braking problems are a case in point. For years, Toyota has been known as one of the highest-quality auto makers, rated highly by all the independent reviewers like J.D. Power, and coming up near the top in customer satisfaction surveys as well. And yet, one (admittedly complex) brake-software problem has put a stain on the brand that will take years to recover from.
Apple’s recent antenna glitch with the iPhone 4 is another example. Apple has prided itself on innovation and elegance, not necessarily quality, but its recent products have all been widely heralded for having high quality as well. Until now. Like Toyota, the initial reaction was poor – denial, deflection, minimization – and that response has hurt the company’s brand, and put a dent in customer’s perception of how important quality is to the company.
There are some aspects to your products or services that are fairly stable. Feature sets, for example, change monthly or yearly. Performance (under the same load) tends to be very consistent. Inputs – 3rd party products, tools, website hosts, domain registrars – all remain stable as well. But quality has a short half-life. Once quality starts to decline, its orbit can decay precipitously fast, until you’re facing a recall or a horde of dissatisfied customers.
There are exceptions. Twitter is one. But Twitter doesn’t charge for its service. If it did, the Fail Whale might have gone down in history as one of the best quality-control case studies in the Internet Era.
How do you keep quality high? There is a whole sub-genre of business literature dealing with this topic. From Six Sigma to Self-Organizing Teams, from Peer Review to Pair Programming, our industry has plenty of strategies to choose from. But I think it starts and ends with an attitude: Quality is non-negotiable. You will not cut corners on quality. You will not do the expedient thing that might introduce quality problems.
This is slightly radical, especially among go-go internet startups, for whom revenue and (god forbid) profit are the immediate goals; but as I’ve written before, I believe you can have both quality AND profit, and that in fact, a focus on the one helps achieve the other. It’s more about your attitude than any sort of formal process, and yes, breaking the rules is acceptable if you know WHY you’re breaking the rules and WHAT you’ll do to recover from any short-term deflections in your quality program.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. How do you achieve quality in your business?
