In my last post, I described a work challenge around delivering high quality products, noting that despite repeated encouragement, members of my team were reluctant to stop the line, even if that meant sacrificing quality for speed. I offered a few thoughts on why this was the case, including mixed messages from leadership, aggressive deadlines, our tendency to fall in love with technology, and peer pressure.

In this post, I’ll describe a few things we’re doing to try and correct the situation. Some of these things are what I’d call “carrots,” or rewards that come with stopping the line to focus on quality. Others are “sticks,” or penalties.

Carrots

Celebrating line stoppers
If someone stops the line, we celebrate it publicly. At our all eCommerce team standup this week, we discussed a project that didn’t go as planned, thanking the person on our team who stopped the line and slowed it down, helping us avoid a big mistake.

Using numbers
Products that are well-designed and well-executed tend to outperform those that aren’t. Regular KPI reviews encourage our product teams to do their best work. Sometimes this requires stopping the line.

Holding design review meetings
Last month, we instituted design review meetings with our team’s leaders (it’s a riff on Ed Catmull’s “Braintrust” idea). At first, our teams were afraid they’d be micromanaged.  But a month into the new process, they see the value and appreciate the attention. And they’re quickly becoming more detail oriented.

Showcasing great design
When something is designed well, we share it, far and wide. Being a team that focuses on quality products is becoming a point of pride for all of us. Building “good” things is boring – our products should be great. We want our people to be able to tell the difference between good design and great design, and to aspire to create the latter.

Finding evangelists within the team
I’m actively recruiting people on the team to promote the value of stopping the line. I started with our UX people, who seized the opportunity to get the rest of the team focused on the user experience. (As you’d expect, it was easy to get them on my side.) By now, the entire team has heard the message, and we’ve got lots of evangelists – and converts.

Sticks

Requiring rework
One great way to ensure someone on the team stops the line is to make it clear that the whole team will be starting over from square one if they don’t. When faced with the prospect of removing functionality from our sites and rebuilding it from scratch, stopping the line starts to feel like the much faster option.

Public shaming
This is a route we haven’t really gone down, since one of our core principles is to celebrate failure. Still, when we see poor customer experience, sloppy design, or performance issues, we let the team know. We favor blameless postmortems, but we also favor paying attention to details.

Instituting sign-offs
Our team knows that when they release code into the wild, they’re implicitly saying it’s ready to go. If we need to, we can make this explicit. This would be a last resort – sign-offs aren’t part of the culture we’re nurturing – but it’s an option if we need it.

These are just ideas, of course. If stopping the line and focusing on quality are important to you, you’ll need to work with your team to figure out how to make it happen, and you’ll likely need to revisit the conversation over time.

As leaders, we also need to model this behavior. This means there are times we need to stop the line ourselves, even when it’s our own work we’re doing and our own deadlines we’re missing. We need to make the same trade-offs we ask our teams to make, and have the same tough conversations we ask them to have with stakeholders.

What do you think? Have you had similar experiences as it relates to stopping the line to focus on quality? How have you addressed them? I’d love to hear from you.