Does quality matter or is 'good enough' good enough?

Does quality really matter?  There’s an expression that I learned from my father and it is “good enough.”  I would venture to say that I have used this expression more than a thousand times in my life.  Until recently, I hadn’t given it much thought.

But is ‘good enough’ really good enough?  It sure sounds like you’re settling when you say “good enough.”  And the truth is you are!

There are times when good enough really is good enough.  Let’s say it’s the weekend and you find a leak in your bathroom.  Fortunately you had supplies on hand to stop the leak until you could hire a pro to fix the leak.  What if you are a student and the deadline for a paper sneaks up on you?  You know you need at least five hundred words and the topic has to be the French Revolution.  You crash on the paper until the wee hours of the night so that you can turn in a paper and not get a zero.  Good enough is good enough.  Or perhaps like me you are not a groundskeeper or a carpenter, but your son or daughter wants a pitcher’s mound.  You build it in your backyard, it’s not perfect, but it is good enough (for now).

What if you are launching a product or service?  Does ‘good enough’ apply in these forays?  Go ahead; think on it for a while.  Obviously you have to wait to launch until you’ve perfected your ‘thing’, right?  Otherwise your customers will hate you and never buy your product.  No!  Good enough is ‘good enough’ here too.  You want your product to be great and for your customers to love it … but if you wait until it is perfect you will never launch. 

After you launch you will get plenty of feedback on the features or additional items that the customers would love to see.  They will help you create “Good Enough V2.0”.  Yes quality matters, but no you can’t wait until a product or service is perfect because it will never be perfect.  You can’t have your product exploding (unless your product is dynamite) or causing harm to its users.  There will be a new material, process or craving that the customer has every tomorrow.  The world is evolving around us; if you wait to launch you will never launch.   Sometimes “good enough” really is “good enough.”