Craft

last updated: Oct 20, 2023

https://paulstamatiou.com/craft/

That's where the challenge of building quality products starts to creep in. The constant tension of shipping faster versus shipping better. Falling into a cycle of "Ship, then iterate" is a trap. It ends up being more shiterate. Things happen and that "fast-follow" V1.1 release or V2.0 you had imagined probably won't. There's always a new shiny initiative, re-org or new leadership hire that throws a wrench into things and changes all plans. Don't rely on a future release to clean up today's mess.

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Leadership, organizational support and incentives. Does the organization care about quality? What does quality mean to them? How does it tie into the career ladder, promotions and prioritization frameworks? Do they focus more on execution speed over quality?

Is quality baked into the normal product development process, or is it often relegated to low priority "polish" tickets that pile up. Will leadership pause a launch if the quality is below their bar? What is that bar?

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Culture around quality. To maintain a shared, company-wide understanding of the company's specific stance is on quality, how does quality get rewarded, celebrated and prioritized? Is there a process in place for delaying a release and having a retro when the quality bar slips? Who decides when quality has slipped? Who's accountable for addressing it?

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Quality is the way you work.

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I've been immersed in thinking about and working on quality for years at large companies. It's insanely hard to change a company's perception of quality and process,

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