Improving Quality in Tech Startups

In the book The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses , Eric Ries talks about improving quality in fast moving environments. Many quality issues happen over and over again because the root cause is never really addressed. A very simple way to get to the root cause of an issue is to act like a 2 year old and keep asking why - in fact, ask it five times. Here is a scenario that happened to me recently - my car would not start.

• #1 Why did your car not start? My battery was dead. You could stop here and replace your battery, but without knowing why your battery died in the first place you run the risk of waking up the next morning with a dead battery again.
• #2 Why did your battery die? I left my lights on.
• #3 Why did you leave your lights on? My headlight switch was set to On instead of Auto.
• #4 Why was your light switch set to On instead of Auto? When I took it to the mechanic, it was changed from Auto to On.
• #5 Why did the mechanic change the light switch? When I dropped the car off, the Mechanic drove it into the garage. When he got out of the car, the lights did not go off immediately so he turned them off. When he got back in the car to drive it back to me, he turned the light switch to On.

We have now discovered the root cause of the problem and we can figure out a way to prevent the problem in the future. We could train the mechanic (by telling him upon arrival) about the automatic lights. We could also add a check list of things to look at when you pick up your car the next time. When things are moving quickly in a business, mistakes will happen. Slow down and ask why as you are fixing an issue to make sure you are not spending your next weekend fixing an issue for the second time. Below is a video by Eric Ries from the Harvard Business Review