Putting the Quality in the Product

If your business designs and develops software products, then core delivery teams should continuously monitor the net quality of such a product.

You can do this in numerous ways, using innumerable amounts of tooling across the product lifecycle.

Yet, some organisations or businesses make little progress regarding quality management and continuous improvement.

Quality is often mentioned but rarely do all organisations or businesses have clear definitions and boundaries for quality across every product stream.

Sure, blockers get in the way. Blockers indirectly push quality management to one side. Financial volatility, lack of product objectives, unstable knowledge centralisation, or misplaced ownership, for example.

But there is no "silver bullet" to product lifecycle delivery. Obstacles and blockers come with building and shipping digital software products.

However, much consistency can be achieved by using a "holistic" approach that couples quality controls with "perceived user value" and "satisfaction".

Sounds simple, right? Well, not quite, hence this post.

What's going on?

For starters, without a dedicated quality advocate reinforcing a quality-driven mindset, often quality management is never continuously reinforced throughout product lifecycles or at least, loses steam throughout critical decision making.

Sure, there needs to be a sophisticated toolchain to leverage (another topic for a future post) in place to bridge multiple workstreams and going beyond this, KPIs can be of great help.

But even if businesses have all these moving parts anchored down this does not necessarily always lead to quality management success.

Quality indicators as product pillars

Opinions on such a subject are divided across industry best practices.

But if businesses are looking for fast and dirty ways to improve the net quality of their software product, begin by magnifying your e2e lifecycle delivery processes. What's really going on down on the ground? How can we "build-in" quality indicators?

There are again, many ways to do this.

Often, I start with a general assumption and audit litmus test, and I like to factor in: "short-term" vs "long-term" risk adhering to the "see-a-risk" then "flag-a-risk" mantra.

In this context, risk should not only be technical hazards; it should also account for potential limits or challenges for internal and external-facing operations. Therefore, flag risk early rather than later, even if the CTO and CEO may shiver when they see your checklist.

From here, you are more or less doing a gap analysis. You can group some of these (premature) risks or limits into some "quality pillars".

The underlying philosophy here is to think of potential risks or challenges as improvement opportunities.

For example, you can begin grouping the potential risks or limits under the following quality pillars - which may include but are not subject to:

1. Pre-production
2. Production
3. Reliability
4. Performance
5. User Support
6. User Satisfaction
7. Maintenance

You can start to dig a bit deeper, clustering the pillars.

For example, pillars are grouped into "customer-facing" indicators, inclusive of end-user/customer support and satisfaction, whilst others are grouped under "internal-facing", which may include more technical operations throughout pre-production and production product performance risks.

Here comes the fun part: you start to gather assumptions and poke around a bit. It's a bit of a thought experiment, and you will have to be careful not to disrupt day-to-day workstreams.

But at this stage, it's important to remember that every product delivery cycle has vastly different dynamics or complexes - what I call "holistic dynamics".

Holistic Dynamics

Such dynamics may include anything from the current technology stack to sprint timelines, overall team hierarchies, and personal issues like the level of participation and overall cognitive toil teams are currently suffering from throughout a delivery lifecycle.

But the ride doesn't stop here.

To be genuinely "360" in approach by way of "holistic dynamics", you should also try to identify whether or not external user factors such as "perceived product value" are being integrated into delivery lifecycles.

This may include measuring (qualitatively or quantitatively) user reviews, net satisfaction, retention rates, number of bugs reported from end-users, number of feature ideas or contributions, support and communication channels, and user confidence or safety (if required). So, pretty much everything Figma's CEO Dylan Field did during the early stages of the product.

Such "holistic dynamics" should be at the forefront of any modern product's quality management playbook or framework. Also, what some experts call "continuous improvement".

But wait for a second; let's take a step back.

Why does this matter?

I will now hand the mic over to the late and great Steve Jobs.

Here's a snippet of a great interview whereby Jobs conveys a "user-centric" ethos, a new product quality ethos, and the beginnings of "perceived user value". Yeah, sit back and enjoy.

Asking the right questions

As Mr Jobs already alluded to, quite often software businesses will continuously pin "out-of-the-box" sticky note questions to the kitchen fridge door:

• Are we delivering our product on time?
• Are we delivering our product within budget?
• Does the product enable users to solve their problems?
• How often are we shipping code?
• Are we retaining users and customers?

But quite often, the other half of the spectrum, this being "perceived user value" is missing or not reinforced.

What does this mean?

Quality is fundamentally driven not only by product performance and reliability but in today's highly saturated digital marketplace - quality rate is also driven by how and what customers "perceive" as sufficient "product value". As alluded to by Mr Jobs.

Often "perceived product value" is communicated as a metric to understand whether the product benefits are consistent with product cost.

But moving forward and with a new digital health paradigm shift underway, this metric should also be inclusive of how well a product is valued from a user-centric perspective.

So, companies need to be holistic in approaching quality and establishing quality indicators for their products or services.

Quality indicators should act as silent but strong pillars upon which a product is built. They set and measure the strength of a product's foundations.

Quality indicators should be designed to facilitate product user experience and knowledge transmission as mechanisms to improve internal operations and the net quality of a digital product.

There is a sweetspot but it takes time to find and it takes a lot of cross product team collaboration.

Bad quality management? Lack of quality strategy? Well, before you know it, users will feel like they are not being listened to or that the product "misses the mark" - impacting net "perceived product value". Soon, product retention rates start to drop, and user satisfaction will take a turn for the worse almost overnight.

Continuous "user-centric" improvement

So for me, I am interested in the "user-centric" approach used in quality management strategies for digital products.

I try to help clients find the quality sweetspot and build bridges between different product teams.

I am also interested in ensuring that digital health products have been designed and carefully engineered with the "human touch" and that "perceived user value" is introspectively transmitted into protocols or operations across the delivery life cycle. Easy to say, right?

So, this, of course, is a big challenge. Don't get me wrong. Especially in highly regulated environments.

But with a total digital transformation and paradigm shift underway within the healthcare market and the rise of digital health solutions, exciting advancements are happening in direct-to-consumer-diagnostics, treatment-triage, image analytics, and personalised health apps. What is more, product and quality tooling is becoming more and more harmonized.

And right now, many leading global healthcare companies are trying to make this shift work and internally develop "holistic" approaches toward quality controls to produce high-quality products and services. So watch this space.