Product Quality
topic on 6 shows · 9 statements across 8 episodes
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 
In Depth 
Cheeky Pint 
Lenny's Podcast 
A Product Market Fit Show 
20VC
9 statements about Product Quality, every show
Epling: Great companies do not necessarily require well-crafted product design
“Hey, I care a lot about product quality and building an experience that's like well-crafted and beautiful and usable and customers love it. And you don't necessarily have to do that to build a great company.”
Songhurst: Distribution and marketing can no longer overcome poor product quality
“The business version of this is, you used to be able to push a bad product to a strong channel with strong marketing and sales. You just can't do that anymore. Like, the product quality will out. You know, it's deterministic.”
Product quality strictly requires utility, then usability, then craft and beauty
“First and foremost, it has to have utility. It has to serve a purpose and solve a problem for the user. Secondly, it has to be usable, right? ... And then third is craft and beauty. Obviously craft and beauty is not, like, you know, nice to have. It's absolute…”
Product quality matters less than sales when enterprise buyers aren't users
“Product matters a lot more. For example, if you're selling into a user who is also the buyer of your product, right? If the user also pays, then if your product is 10 times better, that's going to matter. If you sell to like the VP of X, but it's somebody down…”
Katie Dill: Product quality directly drives growth, not trades off against it
“I know there's this saying of like, it's growth versus quality, but like, Quality is growth. And if you think about how you can make your product easier to use and more understandable, you know, that will of course drive people to use it and use more of it and…”
Product quality degrades over time when components are updated in isolation
“And then it gets out into the world, and then over time, the quality regresses. And some of the reasons for that is that, you know, other things are being shipped. And it's kind of like, again, back to an analogy of a house. Imagine you have one room where you…”
Peiris views customer support headcount as the cost of poor product quality
“So the people costs are customer service team, operations teams, But I like to think of that as the cost of port quality. So you bring up customer support. If the product's not clear, you hire lots of people in the back office.”
Allred: Quantitative analysts consistently underestimate product quality because it resists measurement
“There's no way you can quantify product quality very well. So people who are looking at things from a quantitative standpoint underestimate it every single time.”
$60M seed valuation caps put undue pressure on teams and degrade product
“When you see projects raising at 60 caps in seed rounds, it starts to make you question what's going on, and what it does in terms of the employees is it puts, I think, a lot of undue pressure on individual employees to ship products faster than they probably …”