Don't quote Steve Jobs to justify creating a revolutionary product based on gut

Entrepreneurs often hear that customers don’t know what they want and as a result there’s a misconception that to build a great product all you really need is design talent and a strong gut. There is a fear that anything more analytical than that is going to stifle creativity and innovation. And in justifying product development based on gut, you often hear people quote Steve Jobs: “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.’’

Unfortunately this quote is often taken to mean that great products come out of intuition alone and that building great products requires innate knowledge of just what to build. But if we look deeper at Steve Jobs’s announcement of the iPhone, he said that the revolutionary user interface was the result of years of research. He also pointed to extensive user testing as the reason why Apple has never launched a laptop with a touchscreen. And about Henry Ford, it turns out there’s no evidence that he ever uttered these words. In fact, Ford’s losing market share to GM in the twenties can be attributed to not keeping a pulse on what customers really needed (financing options).

Rather than intuition, great product leaders massage the ingredients of vision, market opportunity and great design talent into fantastic products through 3 core tenets:

• Vision based on a deep understanding of your market and customer: This deep understanding is often mistaken with gut when the knowledge stems from expertise in that market/ customer understanding. Whether this understanding comes from inherent market expertise or user research, an essential element to building good products is sharing the vision and this customer knowledge with your whole team/ company so everyone has the same understanding of the vision, the users and their needs/ the business drivers of the customers you’re targeting.
• Solving a real pain point: Great product leaders are always pursuing the ultimate solution to a real pain point they have identified and validated, i.e. it’s not just your pain point, but you have actually observed your customers and found that they need this. In the transcript where Jobs announced the iPhone, he articulated the pain points with the phones back then that he solved for: the need for a better pointing device that you don’t lose, need for more screen real estate instead of buttons, etc.
• User-centered approach to design and development: How do you know if your solution is on the right track? In a user-centered approach you don’t get feedback by asking people “what do you need” or variations on “do you like this”. This is really what Steve Jobs was saying - that he was against market research where you ask these superficial questions. Instead you observe users, watch them interact with your prototypes and where appropriate, look at their usage metrics to iterate on your hypothesis. Here’s a great read on Jobs’s user-centered approach when making a foray into retail, which was a new frontier for Apple.

So next time you hear someone quote Steve Jobs on why they’re designing a product based on gut, point them to a better Steve Jobs’s quote for each of the above tenets:

• Vision based on a deep understanding of your customer: “Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.”
• Solving a real pain point: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”
• User-centered design and development: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”