Should you always strive to increase the quality of your product? Or is there a point of diminishing returns?
This thought occurred to me after I ended a long-winded conversation with a colleague. We went back and forth for 30 minutes debating whether or not it was a good idea to add a new feature to our client’s portal.
His argument was that this new feature would duplicate information across multiple databases. This would complicate our ability to make updates and fix mistakes.
In effect, it was not “best practice” and would decrease our quality control over client data.
I agreed.
However, my rebuttal was that just because something did not improve quality, or perhaps even made our lives slightly more difficult in the event of an error, did not necessarily mean that it was the wrong thing to do.
There are trade-offs to everything we do in business. Quality is no exception.
Increase quality, and you might compromise on:
- Speed: Lead time increases and throughput decreases.
- Cost: More time and energy is spent on non-value add inspections.
- Innovation: You may become more risk-averse to trying something new.
Our trade-off, in this case, was innovation.
Were we going to let a remote chance of a minor failure deter us from releasing a new and convenient feature for our clients?
There’s never a single right answer. You need to think critically about the problem and know what level of quality is acceptable for your business.
It’s tempting to overemphasize quality. But really, it’s just a feature of your product or service just like anything else.
You can never make something perfect. And it’s usually prohibitively costly or unproductive to try.
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