The Value of "Good Enough...for Now"
Any company interested in being successful, whether offering a product or service, promises quality to its customers. Those that don't deliver, die away. Those that do, survive. Those that deliver quality consistently, thrive. Seems like easy math. But then, 1 + 1 = 2 seems like easy math until you struggle through the 350+ pages Whitehead and Russell1 spent on setting up the proof for this very equation. Add the subjective filters for evaluating "quality" and one is left with a measure that can be a challenge to define in any practical way.
Math aside, when it comes to quality, everyone "knows it when they see it," usually in counterpoint to a decidedly non-quality experience with a product or service. The nature of quality is indeed chameleonic - durability, materials, style, engineering, timeliness, customer service, utility, aesthetics – the list of measures is nearly endless. Reading customer reviews can reveal a surprising array of criteria used to evaluate the quality for a single product.
The view from within the company, however, is even less clear. Businesses often believe they know quality when they see it. Yet that belief is often predicate on how the organization defines quality, not how their customers define quality. It is a definition that is frequently biased in ways that accentuate what the organization values, not necessarily what the customer values.
Organization leaders may define quality too high, such that their product or service can't be priced competitively or delivered to the market in a timely manner. If the high quality niche is there, the business might succeed. If not, the business loses out to lower priced competitors that deliver products sooner and satisfy the customer's criteria for quality (see Figure 1).
Certainly, there is a case that can be made for providing the highest quality possible and developing the business around that niche. For startups and new product development, this may not be be best place to start.
On the other end of the spectrum, businesses that fall short of customer expectations for quality suffer incremental, or in some cases catastrophic, reputation erosion. Repairing or rebuilding a reputation for quality in a competitive market is difficult, maybe even impossible (see Figure 2).
The process for defining quality on the company side of the equation, while difficult, is more or less deliberate. Not so on the customer side. Customers often don't know what they mean by "quality" until they have an experience that fails to meet their unstated, or even unknown, expectations. Quality savvy companies, therefore, invest in understanding what their customers mean by "quality" and plan accordingly. Less guess work, more effort toward actual understanding.
Furthermore, looking to what the competition is doing may not be the best strategy. They may be guessing as well. It may very well be that the successful quality strategy isn't down the path of adding more bells and whistles that market research and focus groups suggest customers want. Rather, it may be that improvements in existing features and services are more desirable.
Focus on being clear about whether or not potential customers value the offered solution and how they define value. When following an Agile approach to product development, leveraging minimum viable product definitions can help bring clarity to the effort. With customer-centric benchmarks for quality in hand, companies are better served by first defining quality in terms of "good enough" in the eyes of their customers and then setting the internal goal a little higher. This will maximize internal resources (usually time and money) and deliver a product or service that satisfies the customer's idea of "quality."
Case in point: Several months back, I was assembling several bar clamps and needed a set of cutting tools used to put the thread on the end of metal pipes - a somewhat exotic tool for a woodworker's shop. Shopping around, I could easily drop $300 for a five star "professional" set or $35 for a set that was rated to be somewhat mediocre. I've gone high end on many of the tools in my shop, but in this case the $35 set was the best solution for my needs. Most of the negative reviews revolved around issues with durability after repeated use. My need was extremely limited and the "valuable and good enough" threshold was crossed at $35. The tool set performed perfectly and more than paid for itself when compared with the alternatives, whether that be a more expensive tool or my time to find a local shop to thread the pipes for me. This would not have been the case for a pipefitter or someone working in a machine shop.
By understanding where the "good enough and valuable" line is, project and organization leaders are in a better position to evaluate the benefits of incremental improvements to core products and services that don't break the bank or burn out the people tasked with delivering the goods. Of course, determining what is "good enough" depends on the end goal. Sending a rover to Mars, "good enough" had better be as near to perfection as possible. Threading a dozen pipes for bar clamps used in a wood shop can be completed quite successful with low quality tools that are "good enough" to get the job done.
Addendum
I've been giving some more thought to the idea of "good enough" as one of the criteria for defining minimum viable/valuable products. What's different is that I've started to use the phrase "good enough for now." Reason being, the phrase "good enough" seems to imply an end state. "Good enough" is an outcome. If it is early in a project, people generally have a problem with that. They have some version of an end state that is a significant mismatch with the "good enough" product today. The idea of settling for "good enough" at this point makes it difficult for them to know when to stop work on an interim phase and collect feedback.
"Good enough for now" implies there is more work to be done and the product isn't in some sort of finished state that they'll have to settle for. "Good enough for now" is a transitory state in the process. I'm finding that I can more easily gain agreement that a story is finished and get people to move forward to the next "good enough for now" by including the time qualifier.
Volume 1 of Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (Cambridge University Press, page 379). The proof was actually not completed until Volume 2.