Month: June 2025

Posted on

Quality Starts at the Top — But Usually Dies There Too

The Lip Service Problem: When “Support” Means Silence

We’ve all been there. Leadership stands up in an all-hands and says, “Quality is our top priority.” There’s a nod. Maybe even a round of applause. And then… nothing.

No changes to resourcing. No new metrics. No shift in incentives. And absolutely no change in behavior.

This is what I call the lip service death spiral:

  • Step 1: Execs declare quality important.
  • Step 2: Teams wait for signals to change how they work.
  • Step 3: Nothing happens.
  • Step 4: Teams go back to optimizing for delivery speed.
  • Step 5: Quality quietly dies.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most leadership teams think endorsing quality is enough. But saying “quality matters” without embodying, enabling, or enforcing it is like shouting “defense!” from the sidelines while your team gets steamrolled.

If quality starts at the top, then so does the rot.

Metrics, Models, and Misalignment: Why Good Intentions Fail

Let’s be honest. Quality isn’t mysterious. It just requires attention, accountability, and investment. Yet most organizations suffer from one or more of these blind spots:

  • No measurable definition of quality. Ask ten leaders what “quality” means, get ten different answers.
  • No one owns it. Engineering thinks it’s product’s job. Product thinks it’s QA. QA thinks it’s a lost cause.
  • No feedback loop. Post-mortems happen. But nothing changes.

Want to know how seriously a company takes quality?

Don’t look at the mission statement. Look at the backlog.

  • Are bug fixes prioritized?
  • Are teams measured on incident reduction?
  • Does anyone track the cost of rework?

If quality isn’t resourced, tracked, and rewarded — it won’t happen. It’s not sabotage. It’s entropy. In fast-moving environments, quality atrophies unless it’s deliberately sustained.

And when leadership fails to model what “good” looks like, they accidentally normalize the bad.

How to Stop Killing Quality: Start Leading It

Want to fix this? You can. But it starts by getting brutally honest:

  1. Ask: Do we really value quality? Or do we just say we do? If you’re not investing in it, you’re not valuing it.
  2. Set clear, shared definitions of quality. Across product, engineering, QA, and leadership. No wiggle room.
  3. Track quality like you track delivery. DORA metrics, escaped defect rates, rework cost — pick something. Just make it visible.
  4. Reward teams for preventing problems, not just shipping features. The team that reduces support tickets by 40% deserves just as much love as the one who ships that flashy new feature.
  5. Lead by example. If you’re in leadership, stop tolerating crap quality because “the deadline is tight.”

Here’s the kicker: you don’t need to hire more QA. You need to hire more accountability.

Leaders shape culture. Culture shapes behavior. Behavior determines quality.

So if quality keeps dying in your org, it’s time to stop blaming the developers. And start asking what your leadership signals are killing.

Because in the end, quality doesn’t just start at the top. It survives or dies there.

Quality Starts at the Top — But Usually Dies There Too
Posted on

Hope is not a strategy. Especially when launching software.

When optimism meets reality

It was supposed to be a routine rollout. Nothing fancy. Just another step in a multi-phase digital transformation. The project team was confident. “We’ve done this before,” they said. “It should be fine.”

Only this time, it wasn’t. Because this time, they were flying blind with their eyes wide open.

Parallel launches across regions. Overlapping system updates. A handful of key engineers tied up in a second initiative. A predictive analytics model had already flagged this constellation as high risk. The warning dashboard flashed red.

But the team? They felt good.

Gut feeling said: smooth sailing. Data said: brace for impact.

Guess who was right?

Two hours into the rollout, user support channels lit up. Latency in the EU region. Inconsistent behavior in the APAC login system. And a classic domino effect: one delayed sync cascaded into three customer-facing outages.

Was this unforeseeable? Not even close. It was practically scripted. The early warning dashboard had simulated this failure path weeks in advance. But because it was “just a model” and “we’ve always managed before,” the data was ignored.

Hope is not a strategy. Especially when launching software.

The dangerous illusion of experience

In software delivery, a special kind of overconfidence arises from success. When you’ve survived ten chaotic launches, you start believing you’re invincible. The gut starts feeling smarter than the numbers.

But let’s be blunt: your gut is not a risk management tool. It’s a storytelling machine, not a sensor. It remembers the wins and conveniently forgets the close calls.

Data, on the other hand, has no ego. It doesn’t care how many late-night war rooms you survived. It just tells you what’s likely to happen next, based on patterns you’d rather not relive.

And yet, in critical moments, many teams still fall back on hope. Or worse: consensus-driven optimism. “No one sees an issue, so we should be good.” That’s not alignment. That’s groupthink with a smile.

From feelings to foresight: build your risk radar

So, how do you stop your team from betting the farm on good vibes?

Simple: give them a better radar. And make it visible.

Enter the risk heat map and early-warning dashboard. These tools aren’t just fancy charts for the PMO. They’re operational x-ray glasses:

  • Risk heat maps visualize where complexity and fragility intersect. You see hotspots, not just in systems, but in dependencies, staffing, and timing.
  • Early-warning dashboards highlight leading indicators: skipped tests, overbooked engineers, unacknowledged alerts, and delayed decision-making. All the invisible signals your gut can’t process.

And here’s the kicker: when these tools are part of your regular rituals—planning, retros, leadership syncs—they stop being side notes. They become part of how you think.

Because when risk becomes visible, it becomes manageable. And when it’s manageable, it’s not scary.

So go ahead, listen to your gut. But if your dashboard is screaming, maybe it’s time to stop hoping and start acting.

Quality is not just what you build. It’s how you prepare.