Defensible, but not good

👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my bi-weekly newsletter on managing up, leading teams, and standing out as a high performer. To level up faster, check out my intensive 2-day course on Executive Communication & Influence.

Read time: 3 minutes

There is a difference between work that seems useful vs work that’s actually useful.

Your work can be:

Defensible

Meet all stated requirements

Look fine at first glance

Be wrapped in professional polish

...and yet still fundamentally miss the mark on adding actual value.

It’s a natural human tendency to optimize for “not getting into trouble” rather than “figuring out the truth.” Even environments that pride themselves on rejecting mediocrity can fall into this trap of surface-level adequacy.

I care a lot about quality, which is a tough topic that often feels subjective. But one question I’ve started asking myself and my clients who care about quality is:

“This is defensible. But is it good?”

Do we need to see a spike in abandonment rates to make our product flow better?

Do we need to wait until customers riot before we improve our service?

Do we need to wait until users start deleting our app en masse to make things better?

Many of us wait for dramatic, obvious clues that things are going south, assuming anything before that is fine.

I believe it provides a false sense of security to wait for obvious signs that something is wrong before you wonder if something is wrong.

“Our product sucks, but our metrics aren’t tanking, so it’s probably fine.”

One of my coaching clients is a COO. Their team keeps using the excuse of wanting more data before making an improvement to the product.

They say, “The unsubscribe rate of X email is in line with the average. We don’t need to improve our emails.”

Folks, we can use our eyes here.

The emails are confusing, ugly, and adds no value. We don’t need to gather data to tell us this. We are allowed to use our judgment. We MUST use our judgment.”

They are a small startup, th…