Speed drives quality

The faster you deliver, the faster you’ll achieve high quality.

This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. Quality is not something that can be achieved through thought alone; it requires contact with reality to get feedback on what is good and what’s not. And the only way to get feedback is to put it out there — to deliver it in the hands of an end user.

This parable from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear, puts it best:

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Applied to software product development (the focus of this blog), this takes many forms:

• Share a boxes-and-lines napkin drawing of a proposed architecture for feedback in the next hour instead of spending a week putting together a polished technical design
• Share a draft pull request that only defines class and method signatures for feedback instead of waiting to implement all code changes
• Share a vibe-coded prototype with customers for feedback instead of building out the feature in full

In short:

If the first time someone is asked for feedback is on the finished product, it’s already too late.

Get feedback early — even painfully early. There’s a real truth to the saying that you should release before you feel you’re ready. The risk of waiting is wasted time and effort from going down the wrong path. Feedback is your GPS: check it early and often so you don’t get lost.