Before launching the first iPhone, Apple had a secret room with a singular focus — perfect the feeling of opening a new iPhone. Hundreds of prototypes were made, and one packaging designer would unbox every single one, box after box, till they’d found the perfect amount of “pull” to reveal the phone. Creating anticipation in such a previously overlooked part of the experience, felt like magic.
All great products need these custodians of quality. People that examine an experience from every angle, seek out imperfections in even the smallest details, and ensure the customer gets the best experience possible. Investing in quality as a startup is a perennial challenge though. Even for startups where they differentiate on quality, they will never have the time or resources to spend months locked away in private rooms, with millions in R&D to perfect an experience. They need to do more with less.
Default custodians
The default custodians of quality in startups tend to be Designers & Engineers. As core creators of the product, their collaboration has the biggest impact on the quality of what is shipped to customers. Demoing and reviewing the work together, they ensure what will be shipped matches original intent/goals, works reliably and performantly. To ensure it actually feels right in real world use.
What feels right is subjective though. And the further away those Designers and Engineers are from the end customers perspective, the bigger their blindspots and biases will be — rather than improving what feels right to customers, they will bias to what feels right to them. As they turn over the experience again and again in their hands, they forget what it feels like to use for the first time. Getting used to the sharper corners and rough edges, and lose sight of what actually feels great to use as a customer. The result is either launching a mediocre experience for customers, or taking an untenably long time to launch something at an acceptable quality. The custodians are now bottlenecks of quality. Not only in getting this experience launched, but in creating new experiences for customers. The teams have to choose between doing less to maintain high standards, or compromise on quality to get more to customers, or find ways to do more with less.
Blindspots & biases
While bringing in the customer is the best way to balance these blindspots and biases, most early product teams don’t have the time or resources for these initiatives. For any reasonably sophisticated product as well, the customer really needs to spend time in real use to give meaningful feedback. Without access to this critical perspective in the work, custodians need to include other perspectives to accelerate launching high quality experiences.
While it doesn’t happen in private rooms, this process of refining experience quality before launch often feels opaque to the rest of the company. Locking valuable perspectives out of the conversation — perspectives that can contribute and quickly elevate the final outcome of the work. Instead of just Designers and Engineers turning something over, again and again, partners in quality from across the organisation can quickly balance out the biases and blindspots of the team looking at the work.
Customer facing perspectives, Sales, Success and Support, all interact with the product and with customers every day, all from different vantage points. Seeing and experiencing aspects of both that Designers and Engineers find hard to see. How easy to understand will this feature be to sell to buyers? What common setup hurdles might new customers face with this? How do customers commonly get stuck in this part of the product? How could all of these be improved? Each of these perspectives can serve as proxies of a real customer, and help see the work with fresh eyes. Information that helps custodians quickly and easily elevate an experience before launch. Changing it from something that feels fine to use, to feeling great to use.
Improving the culture
The value of bringing in more perspectives to this process doesn’t just improve the quality of experiences. It also elevates the quality of the company culture creating them. No closed doors, no private rooms. Open, more collaborative cultures. Where perspectives feel heard, and actively contribute to better quality experiences. A quick short term change, that can have great long term impacts on quality across the board.
Opening the door to this can be daunting to custodians of quality. It can feel like a dilution of power and influence. Creating by “consensus”. Or increasing instability in known and familiar ways of doing things. But that’s exactly why we should open the door. If custodians of quality brought in and empowered more partners in the product development process, it doesn’t just increase product quality quickly, but to strengthen the cultures behind creating them. Not just before launch. But throughout the lifecycle of creating the product.