JK Rowling on the Power of Failure and Imagination

I tweeted about this earlier today, but JK Rowling's 2008 Harvard commencement speech on the twin pillars of failure and imagination was an awfully good read (though not good enough to topple Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement address as the best I've read).

The speech was timely for me as I've recently been dealing with the issue of failure in relation to a product we rolled out at the beginning of the year which was, ultimately, deeply flawed and brought upon my head the wrath of many, many users.

The product didn't fail to meet the feature requests and needs of the users. It had all the features they had requested and then some. Where it failed, miserably, was in implementation. From the overall UI direction, to security, to QA testing, there were failures large and small which, when driven home through extensive use of the product, made many in our user base not just dislike the product, but hate it. I've now come to look at it as the Word 6.0 of our product development history.

There's a silver lining, though. Through failure, we've gone hat-in-hand to our users to ask how we can do things better and have gotten some really great ideas on how to fix things in return. We've taken a look at our overall development process and tweaked it to improve visibility earlier in the product development cycle. We've reviewed QA and testing practices and empowered that team to speak up earlier and hold releases if evaluative criteria have been met.

Failure is a powerful tool in the software development arsenal. It's scary, sure, but a superb teaching tool because it forces you to imagine how to do things better and then to actually do better the next time around.