Craft: Thoughts on elevating product quality

How have I never heard of the term “shiterate”?!

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.

“Quality” is so much more than pleasing aesthetics and abundant animations.

Quality is all-encompassing.

It’s accessibility so that everyone can use it.

It’s performance and ease of use so it respects the user’s time and helps them accomplish their tasks when they need.

It’s reliability so they can feel good about having this tool in their pocket for when they need it.

It's durability with designs and components that can scale to withstand future needs and uses.

It’s well-considered.

It’s the feeling that a lot of time and care went into creating the product: that someone has already thought of you.

Of course, it can also be a bit extra and bring delight in unexpected places and important moments.

The author asks a great question: if we all agree quality is a good thing, and nice to have, why isn’t there more quality in the world?

Liberal use of "MVP" or "it's just an experiment" [is often a way] to skirt around typical quality standards and ship something subpar?

…Ditch the term MVP and use SLC (Simple, Lovable, Complete).

I like that there’s no silver bullet peddled in the article. Quality is hard. And it’s a way of working more than it is a measurable quantity.

teams should be working in a way where everything is considered and there's a framework for identifying, discussing and prioritizing quality-related issues so that quality is a bit less of a sisyphian task.

This resonates with my experience:

What doesn't work in my experience is marking tickets you can't get to before your deadline as design debt, tech debt or polish to tackle later. Polish is an easy word to equate to design tickets but it's an especially poor choice as most people tend to think it's defined as optional, obsessive and unnecessary details.