Quality Starts with a solid Product Roadmap

Years ago I had a Sr VP of Product ask me why he had to pay for defects, and why didn’t the teams deliver high quality in the first place.

This is I think a common thought among many business leaders.

The answer I provided him was that Product Management had no clear vision that their teams could work from, so Product Management was prone to change direction frequently and then expecting the team to still deliver on a fixed date that they made up. I told him that for technology teams to deliver high-quality products, they needed time to review and obtain context about what they would be developing. By changing direction but providing no time for the teams to review, design and plan out the work. The result is that they will deliver something, but it won’t be of high quality and that is where your defects arise.

And here is the thing, if your job is product management and you can’t reasonably decide what customers or the organization needs in the next 12 weeks, then you have way bigger problems than the quality of your product. Blaming development teams for poor quality when you have no clear strategy for your product is like deciding to build a house, then halfway through changing it to an office building and expecting the quality of the work to be high, it doesn’t happen like that.

For all the bashing of Agile and the various frameworks we leverage to operationalize agile delivery, the real problem is not having a transparent view of where we are going with our products and business. No amount of maturity in agile frameworks will solve this problem. Quality starts at the very beginning of ideation, not at the end.