Building a high-quality product takes teamwork. Maintaining a best-in-class product while continually developing high-quality features and giving a stellar customer experience, takes a quality-driven culture. We teamed up with Invotra in this new guide, Building a Culture of Quality: How Teams Can Use Quality to Achieve Business Goals, to explore the strategy behind building a culture of quality. While every company will have its unique and special culture, all companies can benefit by incorporating a quality mindset into their culture to help them achieve business goals.
Good Quality Standards Lead to Good Business Practices
“Quality needs to exist throughout an organization.” – Paul Zimmerman, COO, Invotra
In today’s global market, customers have the ability to endlessly compare competing products and technologies. Quality is often the very best differentiator one can offer in their space. Creating a quality-driven culture at your company is one of the most effective ways you can ensure your company is building great products and delivering delightful customer experiences.
Culture is the “personality” of your company. It influences the traits and behaviors of the people who work there. Embedding quality into your company culture, and subsequently into every part of the business, positively impacts the bottom line. From Product and Engineering who design and build products, to Sales and Marketing who put them into the hands of buyers, to Customer Success who ensures a delightful experience and ensures customer retention, to Recruiting and People Ops who hire and foster the talent that brings the business to life… Quality is a team sport.
3 Key Pillars of Building a Culture of Quality
1. Communication
Getting everyone in your company on the same page is the first step towards building a culture of quality. Make quality a priority throughout each department in your business. Whether that’s through regular in-person discussions at company all-hands, or through an enterprise intranet designed for collaborating on quality issues, quality needs to be part of every decision-making discussion. Additionally, prioritize giving your customers regular opportunities to provide their feedback.
2. Iteration
Don’t just fix bugs, fix processes. Use tools like JIRA and Rainforest to manage software quality and centralize quality data. Tracking bugs efficiently is key to every organization’s product quality success. Once you’re tracking bugs efficiently, build processes to manage the issues in software quality. When you find a regression, always ask, “Can we automate this so it doesn’t happen again?”
3. Focus
While there is not a one-size-fits-all way to build stellar products, every company benefits from tying their quality goals to business goals. The key is to narrow your team’s focus on the areas of quality that will drive the biggest positive business impact. Don’t try to tackle quality holistically.
