Is "Coolness" the Seventh Quality Pillar?

I had always attributed functional quality standards to high-performing products. Should I consider sexiness?

“Why did we add that feature"?” I asked. “Won’t it be hard/costly to maintain this?”

Our engineers had just handed me a prototype of a product I had spec’d out. I purposely wrote the requirements at a high level. The team wanted to inject their own creativity into the details.

“Yeah, we added that feature because … it’s cool,” said our Engineering leader. My guard went up immediately. Cool? You’ve got to be kidding me! (I said this only to myself, fortunately.) The feature had no material impact on how the user would accomplish their goals. It had no functional purpose. It was an aesthetic addition that wouldn’t come for free but did liven up the UI. The old me would have told the team to strip it right out. Not worth the cost. Extraneous. “The things you own end up owning you,” as said in the movie Fight Club and can be applied to product investments too. Yet, something held me back from rejecting the idea outright.

I ruminated on this decision for a week. Then, I started to consider that he might be right. Might.

This feature is part of a new product we’re launching to a new market. We’re validating our solution with clients now and it’s a brand new interface for a problem we hadn’t historically solved. Of all the phases in product development, this is my favorite as a Product Manager. Perhaps it makes sense to add features that aren’t necessarily helpful but do grab the audience’s attention? It’s a noisy, messy market and perhaps this could help us grab eyeballs.

My quest to understand quality dates back a decade or so. I have been fortunate to have managed many products and have gained a pretty clean understanding of the dimensions of a product that can help it win. In my 2023 book, “The Quality Lever”, I explored the six pillars of product quality.

Now I am left to consider a seventh: Coolness. Apple, after all, didn’t need to invest in rounded edges for its phone. Instead, it adds a sleekness to the design. There’s even a science to it.

“When presented with objects that posses sharp angles or pointed features, a region of the human brain involved in fear processing, the amygdala, is activated.”

- Universal Principles of Design

(Of course, Apple would also admit that rounded edges provide a bit of durability too as phones are more likely to survive a fall on a rounded edge. But let’s leave that alone for now.)

The very first product I ever managed had a front end experience that delivered larger projects running in the background. In reality, the projects took a minute or two to run on average. But when I inherited the product from the previous PM, I noticed that there was a queue of projects that held up delivery across our customer base. Most clients would launch a project and be told they were in a queue of dozens of projects. In other words, if one customer was attempting to run their five minute project, it could be queued behind other clients’ jobs. My mind jumped to multi-tenancy, performance, logjams and … well, it was all for nothing. I asked a developer what caused the wait times. He paused, looked away. He seemed embarrassed. “Your predecessor asked for artificial wait times,” he said. “He wanted to give the impression to our customers that our product was popular. He likened it to a line outside an empty night club.” When I awoke from my passing out on the floor, I removed that feature. Customers just wanted their projects back.

Today, our product still has the sexy new feature the engineers thought would excite our prospects. I agree that it’s probably going to help us garner their attention. If our customers want to use us, they probably want something that’s unique. Something that is cool. Something they can show off to their teammates and get buy-in.

“Coolness” as a quality pillar should be treated like the other pillars. How much is it valued by the customer? Do you need to be the fastest? The most secure? The most stable product on the market? Perhaps what customers want, in some situations, is something that’s fun. That’s slick. That’s cool.