What goes into a high quality product?
It goes through many iterations but also incorporates a ton of customer feedback while it iterates. I will be talking about software development in this post with examples from my career and video games.
Video Games
What makes a high quality video game? let us compare cyberpunk 2077 with Hades and the different development approaches.
Hades

The Jimquisition YouTube channel awarded Hades game of the year for 2020:
They credit the many years the game spent in beta and incorporating customer feedback along the journey as main reasons why Hades as turned into the awesome game it is.
There was never any forced “crunch” time (think overtime and sleeping under your desk) and the game has been well received by the community at large.
Cyberpunk 2077
Where as cyberpunk 2077 has been the biggest hyped up flop of a game to be released in 2020. There’s an outstanding class action lawsuit, many reports of bugs and Sony pulled the game from the ps4 store.
Yahtzee only got their review copy unlocked 1 day before release, that’s not a lot of time to incorporate any user feedback:
Big Bang releases are bad
Hades had a team of roughly 20 people, they decided to do early access in 2018 on only one platform (the Epic Game Store) before porting to other platforms. It took them about 3 years of development. Source: Wikipedia.
Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012, the team started at 50 people and grew to 500. It was released on all platforms at once and subsequently pulled from the ps4 store. Source: Wikipedia.
With all of the money, time and resources behind cyberpunk 2077 you think they’d able to release a solid game. However big bang releases and expensive projects don’t always get released as planned.
Pick one platform
If you are looking to develop a mobile app or website, pick one platform to learn and iterate on. Don’t start with an Android app + iOS app + Web app only to learn you built the wrong product. Depending on your situation you might pick one platform over the other.
When I was working at Tyro and we were working towards our banking licence, we built an iOS app first for managing your business bank account. Android came after we got our licence and a web banking experience wasn’t even on the tables by the time I left.
Incorporate feedback
My current team released version 1.0 of our app in March in 2020, we’ve since done monthly releases and incorporated customer feedback into each release. This has been a great way of starting with a basic app and fleshing out the features to be the best superannuation app on the market (look I’m biased).
Keep an eye on the app store
Tyro is still doing pretty well on the app store, especially compared to something like the myGovID app which has a similar number of ratings.
Delivering quality products
You don’t need a giant team or lots of $ to build high quality products. If you start small and incorporate feedback it’ll be money better spent than a big bang approach.
Check out :
- a mobile test strategy
- metrics and quality
- a day in the life of a mobile app tester
- Risk based approach for automation
to read more about my approach to quality and mobile apps.