Recently, CEO of Linear Karri Saarinen posed a few interesting questions on X.
I thought about this and replied to his post:
It’s difficult.
It's easier to make a pitch deck about planned features, write a LinkedIn post, talk to investors, improve sales numbers with corporate clients that won't have more than 10% adoption company-wide, and book company retreats than it is to build a sustainable, “quality” product that improves users' lives and/or workdays.
It’s subjective.
It's subjective: While many people can tell you what's garbage, fewer can tell you what's great, and fewer still can build that great, “quality” product. I believe you and I agree on the term, as will most who follow you and reply to this post. But, I've quoted the term in my reply because it still is ultimately subjective. We're in an echo chamber of talent in the tech community (and particularly in the product design community), which is a fantastically small percentage of workers who can affect change in a company.
It's expensive (but worth it).
While a super majority of company decision makers claim to care about “quality” of their product(s), they also prioritize that “quality” after revenue in all circumstances. Nuance would mean this priority list is fluid, changing as the business evolves. But, rather than view “quality” as integral to reaching a level of satisfactory revenue, leadership typically views “quality” as something they'll eventually get around to addressing. In the meantime, employees who care about “quality” either find another role in a company that actually cares about it, or are laid off as the company solely pursues revenue benchmarks (and as a result, valuation) and realizes cutting cost is usually easier than improving users' lives.
It's hard to justify.
There is often a steep cost to “quality” products, particularly in the early stages of building. This cost is offset in the long-run when an efficient team of highly-skilled workers build something meaningful and prove that users care about great products and will not only pay a premium for them, but actually become lifelong customers. This long-term success flies in the face of short-term, fueled-by-VC “growth” metrics and when the next round of funding is always around the corner, “quality” gets pushed aside.
I view “quality” as:
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Spending the time. You’ll exhaust the extra hours, days, weeks, and months on details that 99% won’t see. But the 1% who see that perfectly placed inner shadow, right amount of translucency, subtle background blur upon hover, will smile. Those will become the vocal minority who
talkrave about your product, and encourage others to try it. - Re-designing/coding/planning/processing decisions. The first version you launch is the beginning, not the end. From there, you’ll tweak and continue to tweak things until they’re “just so” and then you’ll revisit that in a few weeks, months, years, continuing to refine.
- Letting go of quantity. Understanding that if you want to create the highest “quality” you’re simply not going to be creating the high quantity you’d otherwise produce. You won’t be able to ship as many features, but the ones you will ship will be worth it. Less is more. Saying “no” to more is hard.
- Continuously learning, growing, challenging, expanding, sharpening. “Quality” isn’t static. It’s dynamic. The more you learn, the more you want to learn. The goal isn't to be perfect; just incrementally better. Learn more today to ensure that you’ll create something great tomorrow. And then, “tomorrow” becomes now, and the thing you’re working on has the level of polish you’ve dreamed of creating.
- Getting feedback from leaders. I don’t mean leaders in the job title sense of the word, although some thought leaders in their respective fields are in positions of powerful roles, so much as intellectual superiors. When I receive feedback from people I look up to, that feedback is often so invaluable that I take it with me and utilize it from that point forward. The enduring advice from leaders inspires me to continue to strive to create “quality”. And the cycle repeats when you’ve gone back to the proverbial (or literal in some instances) drawing board, then return to the leader/mentor to get a second round of opinions/feedback/critique/wisdom.
That’s my version of it. But others feel differently. That’s fine. In fact, it’s great.
The ever-present challenge is getting multiple people to agree on not only what “quality” is but being able to effectively collaborate to build something to this high standard. And it's so worth it.
