TBM 201: The Myth of Quality Tradeoffs

Note: I slipped in a weekend post on Product Team / Enabling Team Collaboration. Back to my Thursday cadence…

A real estate investor constructs a rental property and skimps on quality. Every time the contractor asks the investor, "do you want to do X, which will cost more but will last longer, or Y, which is cheaper and will not last as long" the investor says Y. Unless, of course, the contractor says "X is more expensive, but in the long run it will save you money," in which case the investor says, X.

Why? A high-quality house is not important to them. They're confident they can achieve their financial goals without paying for top-quality work, fixtures, materials, etc. If a tenant hates the house, "they can find a new place to live." In effect, they want a high-quality rental property" not an intrinsically high-quality home. 

Here we can evoke the classic take on the classic:

Quality is value to some person (who matters).
Jerry Weinberg's quote adapted by Michael Bolton & James Bach. 

The fact that someone can produce a house that lasts a hundred years or feels comfortable, welcoming, secure, and stable is irrelevant. Quality and value (and humans) are intrinsically linked.

The investor is making tradeoffs. In product, we’re always making tradeoffs!

Right? Well..

I see a revisionist history of past "quality tradeoff" decisions in many companies. The current version of the story describes a strategic and calculated cost/benefit decision. But what was going on at the time? I can tell you one thing—it wasn't like the investor and contractor example from the first paragraph. No one had the calculator out.

Back then, it was more controlled chaos than calculated choice. Realistically, there was 1) high uncertainty, 2) short-term pressure to deliver, and 3) differing perspectives on quality. The mantra was "keep moving, and keep shipping!" No one imagined that five years later, they would be sitting around a conference room table waxing poetically about strategically sacrificing quality (and now having to deal with the repercussions). 

It wasn't a "tradeoff" or "sacrifice" because a tradeoff denotes A CHOICE. Realistically, this was not a calculated choice. It just happened.

This brings up an important question.

Why do some companies seem capable of doing the work they need to do and keeping quality levels relatively high (not perfect, and not without ebbs and flows, but relatively high), while other companies believe that doing both is impossible and let things slip to the point where unwinding things is exceedingly difficult?

Same pressures. Different results.

1. Learned the hard way. Unless you've seen something go entirely to shit, you are unlikely to understand, on a deep level, how bad things could get (and how quickly they could get worse)

2. Long-view and patience. Writes Robert Lippert: "To me, quality is being able to ship and iterate on an item later. That way, I can deliver fast and make sure that quality will improve over time if needed. I think the most limiting factor to that perspective is patience." I love this quote because it suggests that a quality approach can make learning easier and increase quality. 

3. Shared understanding. Writes Mark Noonan: "If an org hasn't explicitly defined quality, it can be traded away invisibly. Every unit of work always "hits the bar" for a set of reviewers, but quality as a whole becomes uneven without any deliberate decision or awareness. So having a definition is a factor." As we learned above, this shared understanding will necessarily overlap questions about value and customers.

4. Skills. Working small, not bikeshedding, considering extensibility (without obsessing over it), focusing on thin slices, etc., takes skill. Working in the way that Robert Lippert describes above takes skill (as well as patience).

5. They make high quality "cheaper". Some companies make achieving higher quality cheaper than other companies—the same level of quality, much less overhead. For example, a good design system makes doing the right thing easier. The right organizational design and architecture allow teams to spend more time on quality work and less time juggling dependencies and processes.

6. Leadership's core beliefs. If leaders believe that quality and innovation are a tradeoff, then there's little the team can do. If they've learned the hard way (perhaps), then even when they run things a bit fast and loose, they'll listen when someone raises the flag.

These six points (among others) explain why some companies seem to have a healthy relationship with the idea of quality. They may talk about making "tradeoffs" but rarely let things slip too far.

In contrast, other companies are mired in endless quality debates and posthoc rationalizations about "tradeoffs". They think they are making tradeoffs, but they aren't. Until they have to—at which point their hand is forced.

Challenge that idea that you have to “balance” quality and innovation or moving quickly. Take a high quality approach TO innovation and moving quickly :)