Defensible, but not good
An idea can seem reasonable on the surface, but still not be the right decision. Ask yourself, “This is defensible. But is it good?”
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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, they are not in a position to A/B test everything in order to make decisions. They have to use their creativity and taste.
Another client has gotten feedback for not being vocal enough and not having enough of a perspective. He’s a talented engineering manager, and his response was, “I feel like if the idea is decent, I’m good to go with it.”
If you work with decently competent people, there are many ideas that are decent. Is “decent” good enough? It depends on the situation, and of course you shouldn’t try to maximize everything.
But many times, “decent” doesn’t meet the bar for allocating finite budget and finite headcount on an initiative. If you only get a limited number of bets per quarter, you should have conviction that this is the bet you want to make.
There are many ideas that are okay. It doesn’t mean you should drop what you’re doing and do those ideas.
You can run around doing busy work, following “processes,” and doing defensible stuff like setting up customer calls, but still not make real progress.
It requires intellectual honesty to make sure you’d stand behind the decision you’re making. Don’t hide behind doing things that are defensible, but don’t actually move the needle.
Further reading
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This is difficult because it requires judgment and that is subjective. People find comfort in numbers and metrics because that’s defensible. Nobody gets fired for “good” (but meaningless) metrics but if you make a judgement call and it doesn’t work out there’s always the fear of blowback.