On Quality & Accountability
Quality is not an act, it is a habit built on accountability
Some believe quality is an act. That you perform a quality review as a phase within a project. Or that quality is the responsibility of a single individual.
In reality, quality is a habit. It is built over time by applying knowledge, engaging in conversation, researching analogues and working as a team to hold each other accountable.
That last part, accountability, is key. If you cannot hold one another accountable, then your team is doomed to deliver sub-par work each time. Accountability is the crucial emotional pull that builds quality because it brings gravitas and scrutiny to each decision and implementation. It centres the team on delivering excellence together, rather than pass the buck. In that paradigm not only will you see an uptick in the quality from teams, but also an improvement from individuals because people typically hold themselves to the standards and norms ingrained in the culture around them.
When accountability is shared, the debate is welcome, not discouraged, and meetings are more productive. When accountability is shared, individuals seek the best answers not control over a domain.
To drive accountability and deliver the amazing quality you must share the same goals and outcomes across each member of the team. If a developer is being judged on only the adoption of the technology within a team, rather than what the team is trying to accomplish - the impact of the experience will dip.
So this begs the question - what outcomes do you NOT share with your partners? In the above example how could a product manager align the goals of the development organization to their product and how could the development organization work with the product managers to ensure the tech adoption was a priority for the team? Is that even a good idea based on the maturity of the product? Are we experimenting on a feature or delivering a new workflow?
You can see how simply asking the questions around creating common goals begins to open up the possibilities of better collaboration and the accountability of owning outcomes together. Thus improving the overall quality.
But there is a catch - if your partners cannot articulate their own functional goals than something is missing. And what typically is missing is that functions overall strategy to deliver the outcomes to the customer and the business over an extended time frame. This can create even more havoc because it is these functional goals, owned together, that deliver the quality of an amazing experience. When individuals across a company are aligned that each section of their work is just as important as the others it creates debate that ensures the best outcomes. But when a function puts time over experience, or experience over code, or code over time, the right constraints for innovation cannot be attained. Employees will be unhappy because they will not be equals in the pursuit of a collective quality (whatever your norm may be) - but rather the pursuit of some other person's view of it.
