Not everyone can design the product they want - its quite a rare skill. You get wrapped up in irrelevant features.
This skill is hard to find in a startup because founders have more technical acumen than the market. In other words founders are "power users," and most markets are not.
Also, editing your own work, as in looking at something that you've spent months on, saying, "this sucks," and restarting takes a lot of discipline. For a start-up that is worried about its runway, the stress of doing so can be overwhelming.
Be very, very careful here. You can just as easily lose your shirt as you can come up with a hit. What your users will buy and use may be very different from what you think.
What sometimes works in the consumer market often doesn't work in the business to business space. There are cemetaries full of companies that designed for themselves, especially in software.
When I hear someone like Steve Jobs say he doesn't do market research, it reminds me of people saying they don't watch TV. Yea, right. Not in public anyway.
Sometimes I think posts like this are just part of the big PR machine to maintain the "Apple mystique". Would you bet a billion dollars of someone else's money without talking to anyone first?
I'm not sure why you find it hard to believe people when they say they don't watch TV? This is very common in SF. People just have too much else going on in their lives. Its really not as unbelievable as you think...
Fwiw, I don't want watch tv. (And I know a few people who choose not to watch TV) Too much of a time sink. I don't even own one. The one practical difficulty I found is that most game consoles seem to work with TV sets (and not with monitors, of which I have a few lying around the house) so I don't have a game console either.
A new webapp gets used by Google employees internally first, and you tweak it based on their feedback. But even with 10,000 potential employees QA'ng an app, you still get stinkers like Page Creator and Notebook.
Why? I think it's because no one can stop something from being released at that point. I'm guessing at Apple they either involve employees at an earlier point (judging by their secrecy w/ the iPhone I don't think this is true) or cancel more late-stage products, regardless of the lost time and money.
Websites, gadgets, consumer goods, the stuff that you interact with on a daily basis, the kind of stuff that apple produces.
Effectively that is the crux of the 'we don't do market research', if you are your own consumer then you can get away with that. As soon as you are selling to people that will use the stuff you build and you yourself will never use it you are going to have to do very much your best in order to make sure that your customer is happy because you can no longer look in to their head.
And yet they are a publicly traded company, how does "our goal isn't to make money" work with their fiduciary duties?
"...We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are."
I don't think AAPL stock holders have had anything to complain about for the past eight years or so.
(I don't know the law, though, so maybe there is some legal requirement to make money)
Even now there's a lot of teams dedicated to market research.
1) the User Interface drawback, read any books on designing HCI and you will be told not to do as the prospective user initially says he wants, give him a mock-up and see how he uses it, he probably doesn't really know what he wants until he tries it; in this type of case without a mock-up or practice, an experienced designer will probably do better than market research would;
2) for something really innovative who is the prospective market and how will they use it?. If it is REALLY innovative, then even the designers are likely to mis-judge how it is likely to be used. This is related to pg's common refrain that a startup will likely change direction, sometimes more than once.
Sure - and Apple's messages to the press are also never carefully crafted for maximum effect.
Doesn't sound in-line with blocking google voice apps.
It seems there are plenty of people who would be happy to use another carrier. And, in other countries, you can apparently buy unlocked phones from Apple. So the agreement with AT&T seems to be more about making money than about making great products...
I'm not staying they have to do tons, they need to have some understanding of who they're going after.
I'm not sure how product research would even help. It's great if you're refining an existing product or entering into a well-understood market, but Apple's game is to reshape the market around itself, rather than reshaping itself around the market.
2. This kind of articles are a bit troubling since some people read them and figure they can be Steve Jobs too. If you know someone like that, you know what I mean.
While the post highlights the PR bit you can see though, it does include a couple of useful links with good insights about the role of design in the product development process.
Every startup should focus on that motto.
