Wednesday, 1 October 2008

The "CEO" Call

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I've spoken to a number of people lately about the importance of quality from the outset. How quality is more than just a bias, and how seemingly harmless compromises to quality come back to haunt you and your enterprise in unsuspecting ways -- often with interest.

Truth is it takes backbone to say "no", yet that little word, spoken at the right time, is sometimes all that stands between a smooth running company, and one that seems to struggle with the consequences of their decisions. Do this wrong, and it's inevitable you'll be getting the 'CEO' call from an unhappy customer. I've been fortunate here at Ping, in six years and 260 customers, I've not received that call. I think it's inevitable that someday I'll get it, and when I do, I'll blame myself, because it will likely be something I did, or allowed to happen, that triggered the call, even if it's now 50 steps removed.

I can talk about this, because I've made this exact mistake before. I've bowed to the pressure of a prospect asking for a feature that I wasn't sure I could deliver, only to have to deal with the issue later. These things can be a death spiral if you're not careful. While you might not realize it, or want to realize it, there's a very direct cause and effect beginning with your commitment to quality and how you set expectations. I've been fortunate here at Ping to have people that know how to say no, and know when to call out the fact that we are promising more than we can guarantee, and people who care about our reputation at ALL the times. These people have allowed Ping to enjoy tremendous success, with very little disruption to our growth. Not all my experiences have been this delightful.

Take this scenario as case in point:

It's a tight quarter, and you're not sure you're going to make your numbers

You've got a potential deal which could save you (on paper) in the near term, but you've got to promise a delivery schedule that you haven't thoroughly vetted, and you know you most likely won't make

Some companies would sign the deal, save the near-term embarrassment, and deal with the ramifications later. Others wouldn't take the deal, and would instead take the medicine early. Which company are you?

If you take the deal, and deliver a product that's either late, lacking a promised feature, or lacking in quality, the impact to your organization will be significantly higher than if you had just not done the deal to begin with.

First, your support lines light up, and your support engineers get hammered. This impacts their morale, the morale of those around them, and spills over into engineering, as support seeks answers.

Now your engineering team, taken off point for the current release, must change their schedule to accommodate the fire-drill. This is not only bad for them, and bad for your current release, but it's bad for your prospects, who are now being made promises around your next release -- see how the cycle perpetuates and gets worse?

Your sales team's integrity now is hit, because they are the ones that put their word on the line, promising something that wasn't ultimately delivered, so now they feel guilty. How do you think they are going to approach that same customer later at renewal time? Do you think they are going to discount perhaps, trying to make up for broken promises? Costing the company even more money down the road?

And what about the executive team? Have they been pulled into the conversation too, taking them off of execution of the current objectives?

In the end, there is always a much higher price to pay for a lack of integrity up-front, and it's very hard to build a quality organization if you are unable to make tough decisions along the way. My VP of Engineering has a statement which captures this, "Go honest early." Wisdom.