Jan 16, 2024 · 41m · founders
Working With Steve Jobs
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In this episode of Founders, David Senra analyzes Ken Kocienda's book Creative Selection to reveal the internal product development principles, relentless standards, and taste-driven philosophy that powered Steve Jobs's Apple. He explores how iterative software demos, extreme clarity, and human-centric design enabled Apple to craft revolutionary consumer technology.
Statements from this episode (20)
Clear vision must precede execution in any complex effort
“In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you're trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it.”
Vince Lombardi's coaching style mirrored Steve Jobs's approach to leadership
“Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches.”
Steve Jobs drove product development through physical demos, not hypothetical meetings
“Steve did not want to sit around and have a bunch of meetings and talk about hypotheticals. He wanted to physically see the work, so they pushed all their work forward through a series of demos, and in many cases, him telling you specifically, hey, what I want…”
Apple products evolved through stepwise iteration rather than sudden eureka moments
“We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we had very few actual eureka moments. Instead, this is the main point of the book. Instead, we move forward in stepwise fashion from problem to design to demo …”
Steve Jobs banned employees from product demos if they lacked valuable insight
“And Ken talks about, hey, when you're doing demos to Steve, this is the price to be in the room. If he feels you have no valuable insight, you're never going to see him again. Ken was able to demo several times. He says you have to make substantial contributio…”
Customers demand extreme simplicity because they do not care about your product
“People just do not care about your product as much as you do. You have to make it simple and easy to use right from the get go. And so this idea of putting yourself in the customer's shoes and even attaching like a specific example of a customer helps you Make…”
Steve Jobs believed software must speak for itself without an engineer's explanation
“He believed that stripping away non-essential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and Easier to use over time. He wanted products and their software to speak for themselves. He realized that nobody would be standing over the should…”
Steve Jobs made raw speed the sole success metric for Apple's Safari
“Steve Jobs himself had decided how he would judge our browser as a product. The focus would be on one thing, speed. Steve wanted our browser to be fast, to be really fast, much faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is the product that we aim to replac…”
Steve Jobs rehearsed keynote presentations for weeks until he knew them cold
“Three, three weeks or a month before the keynote itself, Steve would start rehearsing with portions of his slide deck. Slowly, day by day, he would build the show by stepping through it As he wanted to present it at the keynote. This was one of Steve's great s…”
Steve Jobs believed in immediately starting the next project after a success
“At first, Steve attempted to brush off the question, but when Williams pressed him, Steve said, I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful and not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's ne…”
David Senra calls 'Becoming Steve Jobs' the best biography of the founder
“The best one, if you can only read one, and I wouldn't just read one, but if you only had to read one, that'd be Becoming Steve Jobs, which I just read for the second time on episode two 65.”
Great user experience requires actively preventing negative friction
“Designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones. Great products make people happy almost all the time and do the opposite rarely, if at all.”
A single bad customer experience can undo dozens of positive ones
“One bad experience might undo Dozens are a hundred positive experiences that a customer previously had with your company.”
Studying historical masterworks is essential for calibrating design taste
“Studying great work from the past provides the means of comparison and contrast and lets us tap into the collective creativity of previous generations. The past is a source of the timeless and enduring.”
Product design must prioritize functionality over superficial aesthetic appeal
“Shallow beauty in products does not serve people. Product design should strive for depth, for a beauty rooted in what a product does. Not merely in how it looks and feels. Form should follow a function, even though this might seem like a strange notion for pix…”
Building great products requires taste developed through practice, not just pure data
“That building a great product is not scientific. It's not something that could just be derived from data alone. You have to have taste, and one way to develop taste is through years of practice”
Apple never ran a single A/B test on the original iPhone software
“At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any AB test for any of the software on the iPhone.”
Steve Jobs disbanded Apple's Advanced Technology Group upon his return in 1997
“Steve Jobs famously disbanded such an organization at Apple, which was called the Advanced Technology Group, shortly after he reasserted control over the company in 1997.”
Steve Jobs modeled Apple's tech-and-liberal-arts ethos directly after Polaroid's Edwin Land
“Building a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts is literally something Edwin Land talked about and did, something Steve Jobs learned from Edwin Land, and then Steve Jobs used it at Apple.”
Apple combined technology and liberal arts to ensure products adapt to users
“The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts to be able to get the best of both. To make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but a…”