Great philosophies underlie great products

Ever since I first used hulu.com, I knew that it was a work of a great team. I was even more delighted to learn that the product was developed partly in China with the help of an offshore team. The core teams are located in Los Angeles, Chicago and Beijing.

From the CNN article, “Money, it turned out, was not an object for Hulu. In May, Providence Equity Partners offered a cool $100 million for a 10% stake – giving the nascent operation an astonishing valuation of $1 billion.

But the secret of Hulu’s initial success – the thing that made believers out of the skeptics – is the power and simplicity of the website itself. Hulu’s creators focused with almost obsessive attention to detail on the user’s experience.”

So how do companies become great and create ground-breaking products? The answer partly lies in the underlying philosophy behind the organization.

Here is an excerpt from “What defines Hulu”: “We are passionate in our opinion that the world has long since exceeded its quota in the mediocrity department.

We believe our professional calling is to deliver quality. And not simply run-of-the-mill, five-star quality. For Hulu, nothing less than brain-spray awesome quality* will do, down to the finest detail. This atypically high quality bar leads us to sweat every pixel, every second of transcode, every customer.”

So when you are making your next product, ask yourself this question: what is the definition of quality for you? Will your product get a response like “My first hulu experience made my head explode in a brain-spray of awesome.’

This entry was written by Amit, posted on October 6, 2008 at 4:23 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.