Standards by Design

This week I had a conversation with a friend who has recently started a podcast. He told me he wanted to set the bar high and bring on quality guests.

“That’s good!”, I responded. “Just make sure to decide what good looks like for you. If you don’t, your audience will decide for you.”

Right as I said it I realized this is true in business as well. Doesn’t matter if you’re a startup founder or a leader of a larger organization. You need to set the bar and hold yourself to that standard consistently. Because if you don’t define what good looks like, someone else will do it for you.

There are two ways this usually happens, and both are surprisingly common.

The Default Problem

If you haven’t defined what good looks like before you spin up your second team, something interesting happens. Each team will define it for themselves. And they’ll do it unconsciously.

Team A might decide that “good” means shipping fast and iterating based on user feedback. Team B might decide that “good” means thorough testing and bulletproof code. Both are reasonable definitions of quality. And pulling towards different directions.

The problem isn’t that people are making bad choices. It’s that they’re making choices by default rather than by design. Nobody sat down and said “For our product, at our stage, with our customers, what should our standard for quality actually be?”

This works okay until you need to compare performance, or until customers notice the inconsistency between different parts of your product. Then the differences in the two teams approaches become painfully obvious.

The tricky part with this problem is that once teams have settled into their own definitions, it’s much harder to establish a unified standard. You’re not just setting expectations anymore. What should have been a deliberate choice about your standards has become a negotiation between competing defaults.

The Adoption Problem

While fragmentation happens when teams make unconscious choices about standards, there’s another way to avoid choosing: you let other people choose for you.

Ask 100 people about how to scale and you’ll get 100 slightly different answers. All of them probably good advice in their specific context. But here’s what happens when you don’t have your own standards: you start collecting these answers instead of creating your own.

“We should do OKRs like Google.” “We need to hire like Netflix.” “Everyone’s using the Spotify Model.” You’re constantly in adoption mode, implementing other people’s solutions to other people’s problems, without ever stopping to ask: “What are we actually trying to optimize for?”

A classic example is the famous Spotify Model. For years, companies rushed to implement autonomous squads and tribes because it sounded progressive and smart. But Spotify designed that model because they were optimizing for team autonomy at the expense of coordinated initiatives. That was their choice, based on their specific challenges and trade-offs.

If you’re a 20-person startup that needs tight coordination to ship your first product, autonomy might be exactly the wrong thing to optimize for. But you’ll never figure that out if you’re busy copying Spotify’s homework instead of doing your own thinking.

How do you set the bar?

The good news is that choosing your own standards doesn’t require a PhD in organizational psychology. It just requires you to stop and think before you act.

Start with three simple questions:

1. What are we trying to achieve?

2. What does success look like for our specific situation?

3. What trade-offs are we willing to make?

For example, if you’re building a consumer app, your quality standard might be “fast and intuitive, even if it means fewer features.” If you’re building enterprise software, it might be “reliable and configurable, even if it takes longer to ship.” Neither is right or wrong. They’re just different choices based on different contexts.

Once you’ve figured out what good looks like, write it down. Not in some dusty strategy document, but somewhere people will actually see it. Then talk about it constantly. When you’re making decisions, hiring people,​ or reviewing performance, always connect it back to your standards.

The key is to make your standards a filter for everything else. When someone suggests implementing OKRs, ask: “How does this help us achieve our specific definition of good?” When you’re debating a product decision, ask: “Which option better serves our quality standards?”

Most importantly, involve your team in the conversation. ​Ask them questions​ like “How does this approach help us achieve the quality and speed we’ve defined?” or “What would need to be true for this to work with our standards?” You’re not looking for consensus on everything, but you want everyone to understand what you’re optimizing for and why.

Wrap up

My friend’s podcast is doing well, by the way. He decided that “quality guests” for him meant people who could tell specific, actionable stories rather than high-profile names. Simple standard, but it’s working. Because it’s the right one for him.

The difference between his approach and what most people do is that he made a conscious choice about what quality meant for his specific audience and goals. He didn’t default to "famous people" or copy what other successful podcasts were doing. He thought about it first.

The funny thing is, once you start noticing this pattern, you see it everywhere. Companies that seem to effortlessly make good decisions usually aren’t smarter than everyone else. They just know what they’re optimizing for.