John Danner
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Quality Time — A little thing we did in our development process that made a big difference…

Like most seed startups, Zeal doesn’t have the resources or people to have teams focused on specific aspects of our product. It’s more often a free-for-all to find the time to do all of the things we think are important to keep delighting customers and keep growing. One of the things that kept biting us as we were searching for product-market fit was that new feature work always somehow crept up above the things we knew would make for a higher quality product and happier customers. A few months ago, through a random series of events, we decided to try something we call “Quality Time”. It’s usually about four hours per day, in office when we are all together, where instead of working on their sprints, our dev team is working off a backlog of tasks focused around quality. There are a lot of things in there like polish items, technical debt, simplifying and cutting features, experiments, etc. We then cut our normal sprints down by this amount of time each week.

There are a few really nice things about Quality Time. First, it ends the explicit decision making around larger feature work and quality work, resulting in much more quality work happening every week. Second, it makes us much more agile without blowing up sprints. When something important happens that needs attention, we can usually throw it in Quality Time and get it done that day. Third, Quality Time forces us to think about quality in terms of work to be done. The length of the quality queue is always longer than we want, but what we pay attention to is how the queue grows and shrinks. Ideally, we are always keeping up with quality items and the queue length stays pretty constant. If it grows significantly, we can take a time out on our normal feature-oriented sprints and spend a week burning down the queue. And it also makes us decide which items in the queue really need to be done.

It’s not a perfect system for us, but it definitely feels natural to have this focus. I hope some of these ideas can be helpful to your team, especially those of you still trying to find the fit you want. I would love your feedback if you think this is a terrible idea or if you have suggestions on how we can improve.

Founders

Thoughts about entrepreneurship

Co-founder and CEO NetGravity, Rocketship Education, Zeal Learning, Dunce Capital. john@danners.org

Thoughts about entrepreneurship

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