9/18/13 Quality is not a tradeoff.

The Year of the Looking Glass Medium

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Julie Zhuo in The Year of the Looking Glass 5 min read

Quality is not a
tradeoff.
Scope. Time. Talent.
This is the builders abacus, the creators code, the
managers mantrathe three sides of the triangle that
describe the equation of product development. Want to
tackle a kitchen-sink problem? Youre going to need either
a lot of time, or a lot of talent. Want this project out the

FROM THE MOVIE JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI

9/18/13 Quality is not a tradeoff. The Year of the Looking Glass Medium
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door by next month? Cut the feature list, or add more
firepower. This is somewhat of an exaggeration, of course.
There is a tax to adding people or complexity. And not all
time is equally productive. But I dont think Im too far off
when I say that this triangle is pretty well-understood.
But something that is not as well understood is the topic of
quality. Perhaps this is because quality means a lot of
different things to different people. Transforming lives for
the better is quality. Making millions of people happier is
quality. There are dozens of ways to measure it, and
hundreds of ways to talk about it. For the purposes of this
article, Im defining quality as how well somethinga
product, a film, a toy, a bookwas executed. As in, it sets
a standard of excellence. As in, experiencing it, you get
the sense that somewhere out there in the vast and
unknowable world, some person sat down and crafted
something with her hands and the full dedication of her
heart, so that the end product wears its makers love like a
laughing child wears happiness. You can tellalthough
you may never know or meet this personthat she cared
deeply about what she was creating, cared more than was
necessary, perhaps, more than anybody expected her to
care. You get the sense that she would have made what she
made even if it were just for herself and for nobody else.
This is because no detail was left unconsidered, no piece of
her creation left to haphazard winds.
This is what we talk about when we talk about a beautiful
movie, or a novel that puts into words something we feel
but could not ourselves so eloquently express, or a piece of

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truly awe-inspiring technology. There is a quality to the
thing that can be best described as well High quality.
It can be very easy to lump quality together with the other
three pillars of the builders triangle. After all, if you ask
someone to design a registration page in three days, their
proposal is going to be far better than what they could do
in an hour. Similarly, if you had five people bouncing
ideas off of each other like pinballs in a machine, the end
solution will likely exceed what a single person could have
come up with. And lets not forget about scope
sometimes the coolest, best ideas turn out to be the
hardest to build. (Want a live blur on your background?
That shit doesnt come for free. At least, not yet.)
Generally speaking, you can trade in more time and talent
and scope to get more quality.
Alas, the inverse is not true.
I could ask any number of designers to whip up a
registration page to ship in 10 minutes and I bet most of
them would only do it if forced, if I all but put a gun to
their heads. Even if they were damn good designers who
could work Photoshop blindfolded with one hand tied
behind their back. Even if I told them it didnt matter if the
registration page was any good because we have proof
real, honest-to-god proofthat 99.99% of users suffered
from an affliction known as registration-blindness and it
didnt matter what the page looked like, just so long as we
had one, so please just give the engineer a mock to build so

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we can ship this thing and for heavens sake the quality
doesnt matter we just need to get this out ASAPASAPASAP.
It just doesnt work like that.
Why? Because to create high-quality work, there has to be
a minimum acceptable bar. And high-quality creators
cannot trade off below that bar. They simply cant. It
would be inauthentic to who they are. It doesnt matter if
their peers, their boss, the whole wide world told them
that this bar didnt matter and that the right decision is to
give up a bit of quality for speed or time or money or
whatever. It doesnt matter. That person would rather stay
up late, or wake up early, or not sleep for two days
straight, or not do the thing at all if it could prevent him
shipping something that was below his bar. To do
otherwise is to suffer a deep and abiding disappointment
in the self, to betray private values, to lose personal
integrity. I dont know of many great designers who would
choose to remain at a place where they are consistently
asked to churn out work that doesnt meet their minimum
bar.
This is why pitting time or new features against the
minimum acceptable quality bar is an unfair and losing
proposition: Would you rather build feature X or fix that
minor alignment issue with Y? or Dont you agree that we
should fix our P1 crashes before we get to P3 polish tasks?
ormy personal favoriteDo you honestly consider that
flickering bug which only 1% of our users see a launch
blocker?
9/18/13 Quality is not a tradeoff. The Year of the Looking Glass Medium
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Of course I want to build feature X. Yes, I agree that
crashes are more important than polish tasks. It takes
extraordinary obstinance and some measure of
irrationality to be that party pooper who slams their fist
down and declares I think that flickering bug that only
1% of users see should halt our release. But imagine if
you worked out every day and I asked you a series of
questions along the lines of Would you rather go to a
party or work out? Would you rather have dinner with
your family or work out? Would you rather watch a
movie or work out? I imagine youd probably not choose
work out when its pitted against the other meaningful
activities in your life. And yet, when I look at my friends
who manage to sustain a daily exercise regiment, the
pattern is that they treat it as a given, as a part of the
routine, an immutable no matter the circumstance.
Quality is a bar, not a tradeoff.
Building something that demonstrates craft at the highest
level cannot be reasoned into. It happens because of love,
and because there was an environment that nurtured that
love. Jiro didnt become a three-michelin-star sushi chef
because he wanted somebody to make a movie about him.
Steve Jobs didnt demand nearly-impossible standards
because he thought thats what the market wanted. F.
Scott Fitzgerald didnt write the great American novel
because he was trying to publish quickly.
Im not saying that quality has to be your top value, or that
its necessary for success. Thats not what this article is

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9/18/13 Quality is not a tradeoff. The Year of the Looking Glass Medium
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about.
But if you do talk about quality, or you do happen to hold it
in regard, understand that at the highest levels, quality
happens because it cannot happen otherwise.
Because it would be unacceptable to happen otherwise.
Because somewhere out there, someoneor some group
of people care too damn much to allow it to happen
otherwise.
Suggest a link for further reading

Recommend

Julie Zhuo
Product design director @
Facebook. Self-professed tyro
and lover of food, games,
words. Follow me
as @joulee or on
www.juliezhuo.com
Thanks to Mike Sego
Updated
July 4, 2013
9/18/13 Quality is not a tradeoff. The Year of the Looking Glass Medium
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