Quality Assurance

Healthcare Reform as a Product

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877 days
by in Product Management, Quality Assurance

For those of us in product management, the drama unfolding in Congress with regard to the healthcare reform package is a too-familiar refrain. Without wading into the merits of the proposal on the table right now, we’ve watched a team set an initial objective to solve a specific problem (provide healthcare for the uninsured) which has morphed over the past year as deals are cut to obtain the approval of hardheaded stakeholders. As further bargaining takes place to get votes and get the solution through Congress, we have a solution coming up for a vote that both major constituent groups are disowning for different reasons.

Take all this within the context of working in different realities (some not acknowledging the problem really exists/defining it differently), with different value systems and beliefs about whether the current forum is even the right one to address the problem, and it’s no wonder that what comes out of such a process is often clumsy and–ultimately–a poor solution.  A guest blog on HBR illustrates this point with the “successful” Medicare Part D episode earlier this decade: a solution that many don’t even understand, much less support.

In product management, we advocate that there needs to be one “owner” of a problem space and solution, who makes the decisions about what form that solution takes and avoids feature creep.  Those decisions need to be made with a laser focus on the problem being solved and the market itself.  What we’re seeing in Congress–with all bills, really, but highlighted in prime time for us now–is the exact opposite: features added and features cut arbitrarily for the purpose of gaining stakeholder support, not because it makes the solution better. The goal of delivering something to market has taken precedence over actually solving the problem.

This is no way to build a quality product.

Quality Products and Product Quality

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1102 days
by in Product Management, Quality Assurance

I changed my tagline today, and I wanted to write down what I meant before I forget. :)

The motivating factor behind every purchase is a need that a person seeks to fulfill. It stands to reason, then, that a product that fails to meet the need it claims to fill is not a quality product. Whether that’s because it’s designed poorly and doesn’t accomplish much of anything, or because it is designed well but meets a different need, if it fails to meet the need the buyer purchased it to fill, it is not a quality product to that buyer. Across the chasm, once we find a product that meets a need, if it suffers from reliability issues and just flat-out doesn’t work well, it suffers from poor product quality.

In the lexicon of software quality assurance, these concepts are described in terms of verification and validation–verification answers the question “are we building the right system?” and validation answers the question “are we building the system right?” This demands that an organization push quality assurance up from the end of the SDLC towards the beginning, so that QA Engineers are involved with the initial design and specifications. Additional eyes on design artifacts at early stages of development help to expose potential problems and guarantee more of the right questions are asked early enough for them to make a difference, rather than afterward when the only question that can be asked is “I wonder what would have happened had we….?”

Buick?

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1154 days
by in Quality Assurance

Excuse me for having a hard time with this one: BUICK?

Over the years, Toyota and Honda have developed a reputation for cars that “just work” — as opposed to domestic manufacturers, whose reputation has gone in the opposite direction.  This is what makes this year’s J.D. Power results so surprising.  Buick moved up from 6th place to a tie for first, although Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus remain in the top 5.  Even though this news is out, I am skeptical that it will immediately improve Buick’s reputation.

Looking at recent sales numbers, Buick’s sales in February were down 50% year-over-year, while Toyota’s were only down 40%.  Their market is apparently more elastic, but perhaps in a bad economy, people want to buy cars they perceive as reliable.  Perhaps it’s Buick’s “old fogy” reputation?

From a brand marketing perspective, what has to happen–and over how much time–to move the consumer perception of the product known as “a Buick” into a favorable light?  Is it public relations, as in making sure this news gets out and gets into marketing materials?  Is it the marketing collateral itself, such that a fresher graphic design and improved messaging might help?  Or, as I suspect, will it simply require improved quality over a sustained period of time?  Many marketing specialists believe that the market perception of a brand is related to their own efforts…but I think a very interesting angle on this story is the idea that the brand’s reputation is really best manipulated by changes in the value of the product itself.

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