After almost four years of blogging, it should not be much of a surprise that Quality matters. A lot. But we all see (and use) products that are quality deficient, but industry leading.

Why is that? I think it boils down to two distinct factors.

Support

The ‘enterprise’ market is driven largely based on support contracts. Both from a monetary perspective and a customer retention one. We’re switching from MySQL to Postgres next week, but if we were using DB2 would we switch to Oracle at drop of a hat? Unlikely. We would call up IBM and talk to their engineers to determine a solution to the problem. This problem resolution circle cements a relationship. Or kills it.

To build a ‘quality’ Support team around your product, I think you should be thinking about:

  • Do you have dedicated support channels for people to contact through
  • Who is answering the phone? An intern? Or someone who actually knows the product — and its use in the Real World.
  • Are they separate from Sales?
  • How empowered are they within the organization?
  • Is there development resources available to the Support group?
  • When not fighting individual customer fires, are Support members proactively contacting customers?
  • Are there dedicated people for specific key clients?

I think that if you do those things then things that slip into production, and there will always be some, can be overcome from a customer retention / warm-fuzzy view.

Ecosystem

The other area that helps you win the market is the creation of an ecosystem around your product. Linux is the classic example of this. There are a lot of rough edges to the Linux experience (admittedly less than when I learned it way-back-when) but it grew, and grew based on the support users were able to give each other in the ecosystem.

With the rise of Web 2.0-ish companies and greater corporate transparency, the patterns for ecosystem development are starting to be (more) well known. The two big items for my current thinking are:

  1. Have a Community Manager (or similar title) to be the face of the company in the ecosystem. They will monitor forums, email lists, etc. to gauge the pulse of the community. They will also work hand-in-hand with Support to answer questions from customers, and prospective customers
  2. Don’t let the community stagnate. A healthy community is a healthy product/company. When I’m looking at either of those, I check the traffic on their user forums and mailing lists. If the most recent post is 3 months ago, thats a yellow flag.

This is actually the second time I’ve written this post. The first time ended up sounding too Quality Is Dead. You could make the argument certainly, but I don’t think that is what I am saying. Quality is still an important feature; but if you have high quality Support systems and community/product ecosystem then you can often (more than) compensate for minor (and sometimes major) quality deficiencies. And that is what gives you the win.