Ensuring product excellence

By 'product' I mean a typical software engineering product within the IT industry. If we look at purely from the experience point of view it is not rocket science to achieve product excellence. However there are many ifs, buts and loose ends to take care of. Where do the loose ends lie?

Usually, there is a 'Vision' team and there is an 'Execution' team. Care should be taken that people with the right skills should be fitted within the right teams. For example, someone with very high qualifications from world's leading technical institutes may not necessarily be part of the vision team. It might be a worthwhile exercise to conduct an aptitude fitment test such as MBTI test. See who qualifies to part of the Vision/Strategy team. If we follow the balanced score card method of evaluation, the score table will point to those people who understand the industry dynamics, who have continuously tried out other products in the same league, understand the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors' products ('know thine enemy') as much as his/her own products and most importantly can provide an unbiased, devils-advocate kind of opinion when it comes to product strategies.

I have seen in well established product companies that the product marketing team is so soaked into their own products that they blindly evangelize it without working on the gaps.

The strategy team should also evaluate positioning, packaging, pricing the product innovatively and this should be backed by a lot, lot of research. Essentially this team is what will make the share holder value increase and if the guard from the hill top does not see the enemy marching through the terrains, the soldiers in the plains will see no attack coming.

Okay, what about the 'execution' lot? It's no inferior position to be in. Since the visionary team is not perfect, the execution team should have people who are pure managers as well as half-leaders and half-managers. The execution team will need pure managers to see if the product design is well done, if reviews are injected at every stage, if the risk is well managed at every stage, if ample automation is planned for building the software as well as for quality assurance. We need a balanced score card here too. Checklists will not work if they only track if a task was completed or not, if a review was completed or not instead they should track if a task or review was 'rightly' done or not.

And if there are hidden strategists within the execution team, they should be allowed free expression of opinions and should not be suppressed under multiple managerial levels. How often have we seen a brilliant idea or prototype by a junior executive, not well understood by his dinosaur manager.

So, essentially, the visionary team and execution team go hand in hand. They both are equally important and no one reserves to be within one team or the other purely by paper qualifications. It should be based upon the fire in the belly and on natural wiring of the individual.

Product excellence is a function of right vision and right execution.