Defining Quality: User-Oriented and Production-Oriented Perspectives

Ask ten people what makes a product “good quality” and you’ll likely get ten different answers. One person swears by a phone because it lasts five years without a hiccup. Another insists quality means the camera captures colours exactly the way they appear in real life. A factory manager might say quality is simply about building every unit to match the blueprint. They’re all correct, yet none of them tell the whole story. Understanding quality requires looking at it through two complementary lenses: what the user experiences and what the producer delivers. This dual view sits at the very heart of Total Quality Management.

Why quality resists a single definition 🔗

Quality is a slippery word. Philip Crosby famously called it “conformance to requirements,” while Joseph Juran defined it as “fitness for use.” The ISO 9000 family of standards describes quality as the degree to which the inherent characteristics of a product, service, or process fulfil requirements. Each definition captures something real, but each also leaves something out.

Harvard Business School professor David A. Garvin tried to resolve this tension in a landmark 1984 paper. Garvin proposed that quality could be understood through five complementary approaches: the transcendent, product-based, user-based, manufacturing-based, and value-based views. Of these five, two have become the backbone of most quality conversations in business and operations management: the user-oriented view and the production-oriented (or manufacturing-based) view. These are the perspectives we’ll unpack here.

The user-oriented perspective: Quality is in the eye of the beholder 🔗

The user-oriented perspective starts from a simple premise: quality is whatever the customer says it is. A product is high-quality only if it meets or exceeds the needs, wants, and expectations of the people who actually use it. This is the view championed by marketing teams, customer experience specialists, and most modern management thinkers. The American Society for Quality notes that TQM is fundamentally a management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction.

Under this lens, quality is inherently subjective. What delights a young gamer buying a laptop is not what a chartered accountant looks for in the same price bracket. The gamer may prioritise graphics performance and refresh rates; the accountant may care more about battery life and keyboard comfort. Neither is wrong. Both are judging quality by their own yardstick.

Key characteristics of the user-oriented view 🔗

Several recurring attributes define quality from the user’s seat:

Reliability measures whether a product works consistently every time it’s used. A washing machine that breaks down twice a year fails the reliability test, even if its specifications look impressive on paper.

Durability refers to how long a product lasts before it deteriorates. An Indian household buying a pressure cooker or a ceiling fan typically expects years of service, not months.

Safety is non-negotiable, especially for items like vehicles, electrical appliances, food, and medicines. The Bureau of Indian Standards sets mandatory safety benchmarks for a wide range of consumer goods precisely because users cannot always verify safety on their own.

Performance covers a product’s primary operating characteristics. For a car, this means acceleration, mileage, and handling. For a mobile data plan, it means speed and consistency of the connection.

Aesthetics and perceived quality round out the picture. How a product looks, feels, and even how its brand is regarded all shape the user’s judgement. This is why a buyer may pay a significant premium for a product from a trusted brand even when a cheaper alternative offers similar specifications.

When the user is at the centre 🔗

Think of a family ordering groceries through a quick-commerce app. They’re not inspecting the warehouse processes. They care about whether the tomatoes arrive fresh, whether the delivery shows up in ten minutes, and whether the app remembers their preferences. Every one of these touchpoints is a quality signal from the user’s point of view.

The production-oriented perspective: Quality is conformance to specifications 🔗

Shift the camera from the customer’s living room to the factory floor and quality looks entirely different. The production-oriented (also called manufacturing-based) perspective defines quality as the degree to which a product conforms to its design specifications. Here, quality is objective, measurable, and rooted in engineering discipline.

This is the view that Philip Crosby made famous with his phrase “conformance to requirements.” If the blueprint says a component must be 25 millimetres in diameter with a tolerance of plus or minus 0.1 millimetres, then a unit measuring 25.05 millimetres is high quality. A unit measuring 25.3 millimetres is a defect, regardless of whether any customer would ever notice the difference.

Core elements of the production-oriented view 🔗

The production lens focuses on a handful of tightly linked ideas. Conformance to specifications is the central concept: every output should match the design exactly. Consistency means that the thousandth unit off the line should be indistinguishable from the first. Efficiency requires that the process minimises waste, rework, and idle time. Cost-effectiveness demands that all this be achieved without bloating production costs to unsustainable levels.

A car manufacturing plant in Chennai or Pune is a textbook example. Quality inspectors check welds, measure panel gaps, test brake response, and verify that every bolt is torqued to the specified value. A vehicle that meets all design specifications is considered high quality from the production perspective, even before a single customer has driven it.

Why specifications alone aren’t enough 🔗

The production view has a blind spot. A product can conform perfectly to its specifications and still disappoint the customer, if the specifications themselves were drawn up without a real understanding of user needs. Imagine a mobile phone designed to withstand being dropped from two metres but sold to a market that actually wants a thinner, lighter device. Every unit may pass internal quality checks, yet sales may still suffer. This is precisely why the production lens must be paired with the user lens, not used in isolation.

How the two perspectives converge in Total Quality Management 🔗

Total Quality Management is the organisational philosophy that deliberately weaves these two perspectives into a single, coherent approach. TQM is a management system for a customer-focused organisation that engages all employees in continual improvement, integrating strategy, data, and communication across every process.

Under TQM, user expectations become the starting point. Customer needs are translated into detailed technical specifications through market research, feedback loops, and cross-functional collaboration. The production side then takes over, ensuring every unit meets those specifications consistently, efficiently, and at a cost that represents genuine value.

Quality as an organisation-wide responsibility 🔗

TQM emphasises that all departments-not just production-share responsibility for quality. This includes sales, marketing, finance, design, engineering, and human resources. A billing error in the accounts department affects customer perception just as much as a dent on a manufactured product. A delay in a hospital’s admissions desk damages quality of care just as surely as a clinical mistake.

Continuous improvement as the engine 🔗

TQM assumes that quality is never “finished.” Processes are refined through cycles like Plan-Do-Check-Act, and defects are treated as opportunities to learn rather than as events to punish. The Japanese idea of Kaizen, or continuous improvement, captures this spirit well. Small, steady gains, compounded over years, produce dramatic improvements in both user experience and production efficiency.

Why this dual view matters for organisations 🔗

When a company genuinely internalises both perspectives, the benefits show up across the balance sheet and beyond.

Customer loyalty deepens because buyers experience consistent satisfaction and come to trust the brand. Operational costs fall as defects, rework, and waste shrink. Employee engagement rises because people can see their work contributing to something that customers value. The organisation’s reputation strengthens, which in turn attracts better talent, better suppliers, and better partners. The ISO 9000 framework makes these benefits explicit by linking quality management to measurable customer satisfaction and continual improvement.

The Indian context 🔗

The relevance of this dual perspective is visible across Indian industries today. Automobile makers like Tata Motors and Mahindra, consumer electronics firms, pharmaceutical companies competing in stringent global markets, and service sectors like banking and telecom are all investing heavily in TQM-inspired systems. Adoption of BIS standards and ISO certifications has become a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator. The public sector, too, has taken note, with initiatives like the Sevottam framework for service delivery in government offices drawing on TQM principles to raise citizen satisfaction.

Balancing value, cost, and expectation 🔗

A crucial nuance often gets lost in textbook discussions. Quality, in the TQM sense, isn’t about making the most expensive or most feature-laden product possible. It’s about delivering the right product at a cost that represents the best value for the customer. A premium luxury car and a modest hatchback can both be high-quality vehicles, as long as each meets the expectations of its target user and conforms to its own production standards. TQM seeks excellence in products, services, and internal processes while adapting to evolving market conditions, rather than chasing an abstract ideal of perfection.

This is where the user and production views reinforce each other. The user defines what “right” looks like. Production ensures that “right” is delivered every single time, at a sustainable cost. Neither can succeed without the other, and organisations that try to privilege one perspective over the other typically pay a heavy price, either in lost customers or in unsustainable costs.

What do you think? When you reflect on a product or service you recently used, which perspective shaped your judgement more – your experience as a user, or your awareness of how it was made? And do you believe organisations in your own field are doing enough to balance both views of quality, or is one still getting more attention than the other?

References

1. https://www.iso.org/standard/62085.html
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_dimensions_of_quality
3. https://asq.org/quality-resources/total-quality-management
4. https://www.bis.gov.in/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management
6. https://www.iso.org/standard/45481.html
7. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/management/total-quality-management-tqm/