MBA1471 Quality vs Deadlines: When to Choose What

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hunted Army. Welcome to the MBA show, the business podcast you can't afford to miss every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn. How do you balance quality versus deadlines when it comes to your business, your projects, your products, your services? How do you make sure you deliver what you need to deliver? Create what you need to create at a high quality level, but at the same time you meet your deadlines. This is often competing opposites in business. How do you make sure that you're putting out the best quality thing without rushing it to hit a particular deadline? Whether it's you who's creating this thing and have to do the work or it's your team. As soon as you put a line in the sand and make a deadline, you're saying I'm prioritizing the deadline over quality. It doesn't mean the quality is going to be horrible or unacceptable, but it just means the deadline must be met even if it means not having a perfect product. How do we deal with this in our business? How do we make sure that we continue to provide great quality services and great quality products to our customers, but in a timely fashion. Can't wait forever, right? That's what we get into in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. A personal confession. This topic, this challenge of balancing quality and time or deadlines is one of my biggest challenges in business over the last few years. You want to put something out in the world, whether it's a product or service or a feature that's going to knock your customer's socks off. But you can't just have unlimited time to make it happen. You have to have a deadline so that you can plan and promote that product properly. So what do you do? So I'm going to give you some examples from our business. So, for example, at Webinar Ninja, our software, our software company, we often come up with new features, new updates, new new things for our products, new offerings, new courses. And when we come up with an idea of something that we want to create a new feature, for example, we sit with the team, we say, hey, this is an idea we want to do. Our customers are asking for this. And just like our goals, we like to have a good, better best scenario. What would be the best scenario in terms of what does this product look? What's the perfect version of this product? What's a version of it that's not perfect, but still pretty damn good? That would be the better version and good. The good version is a viable product product that will do the job and can be approved upon later. Basically, it's the scope of that project. The same project, for example, we're adding the feature to be able to add new fields in the registration form. So you can collect information like phone number and, you know, job title, other information that you may want to collect during the registration process of a webinar. There are so many ways you can implement this feature. You can, you can make it beautiful and have a custom editor. You can make it drag and drop. You can make it its own little app inside the app. But you can also just have a standard design where they don't really have control over the design, but they can add fields and they can give these fields a name. The absolute minimal viable version of this is just a field with some sort of text in there. So whatever they put in the box is what you're gonna get. We're not even gonna qualify it or check if it's a number. If you're asking for a phone number, that's gonna fulfill the need of the customer. But it's not, you know, the knock your socks off, amazing looking, amazing functioning version of that. It's gonna work perfectly, it's gonna be smooth, it's gonna be bug free. But the good version is nowhere the quality or the, I guess, the impressiveness of the best version. What we do is we look at the good, better, best and say, how much time is a good version gonna take? And we try not to be overly optimistic, we try to be as conservative as possible and add some buffer time. How much time is the better version going to take? How much time is the best version going to take? And we ask ourselves, which timeline can we live with? So instead of saying having a deadline is going to make quality suffer, well, we say we want to have great quality. But different versions of this idea, each idea, each version of the idea is going to be flawless. It's going to be great, it's going to work, it's going to fulfill a need. But one version is just not going to be as fancy as the other. So if this is a priority to get this as soon as possible, then we're better to serve our customers with the good version of this and, you know, the short amount of time to get it out. So if we're in a rush to get this out to customers, if it's like a high, high, high priority, then we better go with the good version so we spend less time. We put out a product that's quality, but it just doesn't do all the bells and whistles. If we have time, if it's not a high priority and we can really go all out, we may well choose the better or the best version. Things start to fall apart when it's all or nothing. Things start to fall apart when I don't have different versions of it. And the thing is that we have to plan from the beginning which version we're going to take on. We can't just build for the best and then say, hey, okay, we're running out of time. Let's just do the, you know, the good version or the best version. You've already built and worked and planned on building the best version. There's a lot of sunk cost in there. And the thing is that you're gonna feel rushed to get that best version out because you're running out of time. And that's when quality suffers. So one of the things I like to do with the team is set some milestones and the milestones should build upon each other. So even if it's like three or Four milestones. The first milestone is just the core function of what I'm trying to build. And this is applicable if I'm trying to build a online course, a coaching program, even a service. What is the basic needs of the customer? Let me accomplish that first in the first few weeks and then once I'm done with that, how can I add to it to improve it and move it closer to the better or the best version? This is a lot safer for your business because if you need to release that new product and the good version is done, you can put it out there and you can work on the best version as it's out there serving customers. You're always going to improve upon things, but if you shoot for the best version all the time, you're gonna find yourself stuck cause you just can't revert back. Great quality, but different versions or different implementations of the same idea. Now I wanna warn you, this is gonna take some planning, this is gonna take some time. This is not super clear cut in every scenario. We're dealing with this ourselves. We've been working on a major update for some time and sometimes you just can't have a very definitive good, better best for every single situation. But you have to try your best. You have to try to do this at some level.

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You always want to put out something that's going to impress your customers. But the most impressive thing is making sure it works. Making sure it actually fulfills their needs. It actually delivers on the result. When people buy something from you, product, service, course, coaching, whatever it is, they're buying a result they want to get an end result. Whether it's to lose weight or be able to learn the violin or be able to save money on their next holiday. Whatever your offer is, they want to make sure that they get that result. And guess what? There are parallels in the world for what exactly I'm talking about. I can get the result of planning a vacation to, let's say, France by buying a $10 travel book, right? Like a travel guide, like Lonely Planet. It's going to take me more time and more effort and I'm going to have to take my own notes and kind of plan it all out or I can achieve the same result. So the book is the good version, Right. So what's the better version? Well, a better version is probably an online course showing me how to plan step by step, showing me pictures, showing me where to reserve my tickets for the museum. It's going to be a crash course and I could probably finish it over a weekend. That takes a lot more time to put together because I got to be on location and all that kind of stuff. But that's the better version. And the best version is probably an in person tour guide, somebody who's going to take you to France and show you around and take care of it for you and get you the results you want. An amazing, great vacation in France. So same result, different ways of delivering that result for the customer. Think about these things before you start building that product, that service, that offer. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 LMBA show. If you love it, you hear make sure you hit subscribe. By hitting subscribe, you make sure that when the next episode's available, it's right on your device. So subscribing is absolutely free. So hit that subscribe button right now. Also by hitting subscribe, you get access to over 1400 business lessons. Over 1400 episodes of the $100 MBA show are archives and the only way to get access is to hit subscribe. Also, if you want to learn more how to grow your business with webinars, but don't want to deal with any of the headaches, you want to kind of set things up in minutes. I'm running a live workshop personally that you can attend online. Just go to webinar ninja.comworkshop to register and I'll see you there live. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes we feel like we're settling if we go for the good version instead of the best version. And the best way to deal with that is just say, this is phase one. This is just phase one of the project. When I give it to my customers and they start using it and giving me feedback, I can improve upon it and work on the better version. And then the best version, it's not over. When it gets out into the world and I sell it is just the beginning. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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