Last week, Kaari Saarinen of Linear asked on LInkedIn (later I saw it on Twitter also) that why product quality is so rare, and why many companies fail to create high-quality products.
It is such an insightful discussion—experts say how “settling for average” plagues product teams, or how speed to ship is their most important criteria, and few more.
I particularly liked how Jesse James Garret (see their LinkedIn) sums up as—”There’s no business incentive for higher quality without an audience that can perceive and value that quality. That often means the highest quality experiences remain niche. Varies a lot by product category though!”
Product quality is about the shelf-life of the product quality whether measured in terms of product utility and usefulness, usability, ROI and the experience, and a customer-centric continuous roadmapping.
Here are my thoughts on why companies cannot build high-quality products.
—
Too many companies tend to borrow ideas, knowledge and even their standards from the competition, the market, or from the customers. This templatization of making a product or building a business lacks the foundational adaptability for how they should respond to their specific use cases—to the customer requests, for changing the business model, the pricing tiers, responding to someone new in the competition, and other unique challenges or the opportunities in their life cycle.
They do not build their capacity of judgment or of their internal strength.
When I think of why people loved Slack early on, it was not only the product utility, it was their attention to detail in the onboarding, in their product copy, and to the customer-centric interactions. When Airtable took off and was growing fast, many startups launched spreadsheets on steroids in the same category—they borrowed the user cases as well as the principles and standards, and so they failed. Likewise for the competitors of Airbnb, or even Notion.
Linear is such a likeable product as I often say. The sensibilities show in each interaction, not only in the product but in their leadership discussions, in the customers’ Slack, and in their blog posts. There might be hundreds who could have had similar product idea—capable engineers, vision, and funds too but they could not build it because the internal clarity of thought and the standards were mostly borrowed.
—
Product quality is the product’s personality—so unique, internally built, and culturally baked in the organization. It cannot be borrowed.
PS: In August 2022, Anand Sanwal asked a similar question on Twitter, on the success rate of startups with all the wisdom, knowledge, and insights, available to the founders.
