You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology
Hi frens,
For years I’ve watched all videos I could find about Steve Jobs, and I learned a lot. Here’s the lesson that probably occurs to me most frequently: “You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where are you going to try to sell it.”
As an app developer, I find it challenging to fully embrace this principle in practice. We learn new technologies from time to time, and we often love using new tools whenever available, just for fun. That doesn’t always bring better code quality or better user experience in the end. In fact, it mostly doesn’t. Just as the saying goes, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
People imagine that new technologies enable new things, which create a new market or opportunity. Quite straightforward, right? And it looks so reasonable retrospectively.
But there are often different perspectives from the builders’ view. They’re constantly finding and fixing problems, and also looking for available tools. They have to focus on making the solutions right, not the technologies. That’s a totally different mindset that makes the difference.
And you’ll know why this 5-min video has gained over 13.8 million views.
To understand the historical background: After returning to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs killed a bunch of projects, including OpenDoc that tried to rival Microsoft Office format, which made developers upset at the time. That was a fierce and difficult conversation.
Looking back, Apple brought the iconic iMac G3 in 1998 and iPod in 2001, laid the foundation for Apple’s renaissance.
Here’s the transcript for the key part:
The hardest thing is, what - how does that fit in to a cohesive, larger vision, that's going to allow you to sell, $8 billion, $10 billion a product a year? And, one of the things I've always found is, that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where are you going to try to sell it? And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it is the case.
And as we have tried to come up with a strategy, and a vision for Apple, it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not - not starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?
And I think that's the right path to take.
source: https://allaboutstevejobs.com/videos/misc/wwdc_1997_closing_chat
Your friend,
Denken