One of the primary jobs of a product manager is to define detailed requirements for features. If you are following Agile methodologies, you write Epics and User Stories and Acceptance criteria and all that fun stuff that constitute feature requirements. But what requirements do you write for Product Quality?
As a product manager owner, do you consciously think about product quality or assume it to be there by default?
Well, features are supposed to have high quality, you say. That’s what we have the QA/QE team for – to ensure quality. In addition, the acceptance criteria does have a few requirements defined.
Let’s examine that.
Let’s take a moment to define Quality first of all. What is Quality? Is it lack of defects?
I once read this definition of Quality somewhere which has stuck to my mind ever since –
Quality is what customers want. Period.
In other words if your product does what customers expect it to do and in ways they expect it to do, your product has high quality. If not, then it does not.
Think about it. If your application fails 90% of the time in some specific module but customers rarely use that module, it does not really affect them. On the other hand, if because of a trivial UX issue, the customers have to press one extra Tab key every time they use a workflow and they use it 1000s of times a day, it may be a big enough problem for them to look for alternative products.
Therefore it’s extremely important that we think consciously about Quality from a customer’s perspective rather than assuming it to be there. If your product solves any serious problem, you know you can’t take quality for granted. If it is a mission-critical application then even more so.
I like to think of Quality more broadly –
- Quality is Robustness: Is your product robust and stable or does it crash or fails on customers far too often? Does it handle error situations gracefully? Does it help the users with what to do in those situations?
- Quality is Performance: How fast the application work? Is everything instant or does it take time? What about Scalability? Loading 1000 records takes a few milliseconds, but what about loading millions of records? Have you really understood the various customers’ scenarios? Have you been putting explicit requirements on ‘Load Testing’ and ‘Stress Testing’ (and do you care to know the difference between the two?).
- Quality is Ease of Use: Do you make things easier to use in addition to the core problem you are solving. Do you think about the number of clicks it takes to perform a task? Are features easy to discover? Are keyboard shortcuts provided? Is ‘accessibility’ even on your radar?
- Quality is Efficiency: Are workflows optimized? Are you avoiding multiple data entry? Can you avoid all data entry? Does your product learn and start doing things for the customer as they use it more and more?
- Quality is Availability and Distraction-Free Delivery: Is your software available all the time? How do you handle it when it is not available? How often are you releasing to your customers and how much distraction it causes? Are the new changes available seamlessly to everyone or do the customers have to take some action? Remember, the time they spent to deal with a change that you pushed on them, is the time taken away from their core business. Where do you think they will like spending their time on?
- Quality is Consistency: If you or your company has multiple products, do you think about the consistency in customer experience across those products? Do you provide single sign-on? How well these products play with each other? Are you providing a single brand experience?
- Quality is Lack of Functional Defects: Your typical bucket of P0/P1/P2/P3s where most of the time is spent generally.
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For any good product, whether its SaaS, Mobile or a Desktop app, most of the items mentioned above impact the customer experience and the perception of your product’s quality and therefore as a product manager it’s your primary job to think about these. If you can deliver both – lots of features and with high quality, nothing like it. But chances are that you will need to prioritize, and often times it’s the new features that get prioritized over other things. The reality is, however, that almost always your customers will like ‘a higher quality product’ over ‘multiple new features with moderate or low quality’.
Does it mean that you may have to give up on new features so that you can focus on quality ? And the answer is – yes – because Quality too is a feature, and a very important one. So keep it very high on your priority list. It starts with you, the Product Manager.
Do you treat Quality as a Feature?
