My Lego Oil Platform: Building Quality from the Foundation Up

In Stu Day's storytelling session, I built an oil platform out of Lego to show what quality means to me. A platform standing in rough water only survives if its foundation is strong, so it has to be dependable, functional, and stable. It also has to be simple, because every unnecessary part is one more thing that can fail.

Much of what holds a platform up sits below the surface, unseen and often taken for granted. Quality works the same way. Performance, security, reliability, and maintainability rarely get noticed, yet they support everything users do see. When we build on solid foundations, value those hidden qualities, and resist needless complexity, we create products people can rely on.