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The answer is there is low ROI on quality and businesses are hyper optimised for ROI. Only when the customers lose their shit publicly it affects ROI and qualit

by hughrr 5y ago

The answer is there is low ROI on quality and businesses are hyper optimised for ROI. Only when the customers lose their shit publicly it affects ROI and quality will improve. We got into a situation where people are so disempowered by design and poor access to routes to complain and demotivated to complain so poor quality is the norm. If you want this to stop we have to collectively rip a new asshole in every half baked pile of muck out there loudly. Really loudly. Start burning up people’s ROI. Buy an app and it’s shit? Get a refund and then tell everyone everywhere exactly how bad it is. When I do this I am repetitively told that I’m negative and this is not a productive attitude but I disagree and see this as a defence of the improper norm. The first step of quality is acknowledging you have a problem which needs to be shouted in most companies faces until they can hear through the fingers in their ears.

hellectronic 5y ago
"poor access to routes to complain" this
regularfry 5y ago
I'm not sure this is true. I think there is an ROI on quality, but the incentives are set up not to value it. The problem is that "quality" - even "performance" - is quite a nebulous, holistic property of the project as a whole. It doesn't fit neatly into a bullet-point of features which all link back to predefined OKRs for the product management team. It's also a nightmare to measure. One thing I've been banging on about at web teams I work with is to measure the relationship between time to first contentful paint against propensity to buy/click/watch/spend time-on-site/do whatever the relevant value metric is. For the analytics tooling that teams usually have in place, that's crossing two completely disconnected toolsets: you've got the behavioural analytics tools, which are typically owned by someone else in the business, and then you've got the technical observability tools, which are usually owned by the development team, and marrying the two up can be astonishingly hard to make happen.
moring 5y ago
> When I do this I am repetitively told that I’m negative and this is not a productive attitude but I disagree and see this as a defence of the improper norm. The first step of quality is acknowledging you have a problem which needs to be shouted in most companies faces until they can hear through the fingers in their ears. I don't think you're negative at all, but the "fingers in their ears" is based on a misunderstanding. Companies have their ears wide open and their customers are telling them -- mostly indirectly by voting with their wallet -- that they want quick and dirty features over quality. Your suggestion to punish bad quality would actually help these companies by removing those perverse incentives.

by hughrr 5y ago

hellectronic 5y ago

"poor access to routes to complain" this

regularfry 5y ago

I'm not sure this is true. I think there is an ROI on quality, but the incentives are set up not to value it. The problem is that "quality" - even "performance" - is quite a nebulous, holistic property of the project as a whole. It doesn't fit neatly into a bullet-point of features which all link back to predefined OKRs for the product management team. It's also a nightmare to measure. One thing I've been banging on about at web teams I work with is to measure the relationship between time to first contentful paint against propensity to buy/click/watch/spend time-on-site/do whatever the relevant value metric is. For the analytics tooling that teams usually have in place, that's crossing two completely disconnected toolsets: you've got the behavioural analytics tools, which are typically owned by someone else in the business, and then you've got the technical observability tools, which are usually owned by the development team, and marrying the two up can be astonishingly hard to make happen.

moring 5y ago

> When I do this I am repetitively told that I’m negative and this is not a productive attitude but I disagree and see this as a defence of the improper norm. The first step of quality is acknowledging you have a problem which needs to be shouted in most companies faces until they can hear through the fingers in their ears. I don't think you're negative at all, but the "fingers in their ears" is based on a misunderstanding. Companies have their ears wide open and their customers are telling them -- mostly indirectly by voting with their wallet -- that they want quick and dirty features over quality. Your suggestion to punish bad quality would actually help these companies by removing those perverse incentives.