Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

https://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-to-his-customers/

by JRutherford • 13 years ago

28 42 13 years ago

tawgx• 13 years ago

I think the best way to work with customers (and I do believe you should) is not having theoretical discussions with them about the market or whether a new product can take off, but rather give them a number of tangible alternatives (can be mock ups) to play with and see how they react to them.

Ciotti• 13 years ago

So mostly relying on reactive feedback rather than proactive suggestions? I agree.

epo• 13 years ago

If you are devising a new product concept, the very first telephone (or ipod or ipad) say, then what is gained by doing this? Your customers have no point of reference. In general, asking customers what they think is only useful if you are iterating on the known and familiar. Otherwise it is just harvesting random opinions, most of which will be variants of "make it more like what we already know".

benjaz• 13 years ago

Often, customers don't see the consequences of "small" changes that they'd like to see. At AOL we had so many people giving feedback on products that it became a customer support issue. One solution proposed was to have a dummy site that allowed users to move elements around. Whenever they moved something on the page (or dragged/dropped from a dynamic list of popular suggestions) they'd see the consequences in real-time. Big bold messages declaring all the changes that were just made would make it obvious that they need to think through their ideas.

ignaciogiri• 13 years ago

He was the #1 customer. I think he was building products that were good enough to use himself, because he knew that would impress others. He was a respectful narcissist.

Maybe I'm not using the correct words or my sight isn't accurate, but at least that's the legacy I got from his life.

Building something that makes you proud and you strongly believe it's the best. And convincing people to think about your product the way you do yourself.

radio4fan• 13 years ago

I'll give you narcissist, but I don't think Jobs had any respect for anyone else or their opinions.

This may have been a good or bad thing, according to taste.

snowwrestler3• 13 years ago

Steve Jobs did listen to customers--more than most business executives. He famously read his own email and would write back to customers directly. He made major strategic decisions based on customer feedback, for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK for native apps on the iPhone.

He just didn't let customers set the future direction of products. The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's Dilemma.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

>> The reason for that is well explained in The Innovator's Dilemma.

Side note/question: I know there's three books in that "series": Innovator's Dilemma, Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next. For someone who has not read any of them, what's the correct order? Are all three required, or is there overlap between the contents?

andyidsinga• 13 years ago

you could go published order. But no matter what you must read Dilemma - its the seminal text.

ryanmolden• 13 years ago

I've only (yet) read Innovator's Dilemma, I would definitely recommend it. As for order, I suspect publication order would be the best as it would show progression of ideas/learning.

SatvikBeri• 13 years ago

Innovator's Dilemma is much more academic and research-filled, Innovator's Solution is more "here's what you do with it." I'd recommend Innovator's Solution first as it's a somewhat lighter introduction. (I haven't read Seeing What's Next, so can't comment there.)

rimantas• 13 years ago

  > for instance by reversing direction and releasing an SDK
  > for native apps on the iPhone.

There was no "reversing direction", SDK was released as soon as it was ready.

aviraldg• 13 years ago

afaik, the original plan was not to allow third party apps on the iPhone

malkia• 13 years ago

Or the lock orientation button, which Steve wanted to be used only for turning sound on/off, but after many users complaining about there was an option put in the settings.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

The SDK example is a great example of "faster horses." The crowd clamoring for the SDK was not asking for the App Store, it was asking for a model like PCs.

bslatkin• 13 years ago

Can we stop perpetuating this myth please?

From http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/apple-reveals-for-mon...

""Apple is famous for eschewing market research and focus groups during the creation of new products. However, it turns out the company does research consumer sentiment on existing products in order to optimize future designs.

Apple conducts detailed, quarterly iPhone buyer surveys, according to a joint motion regarding the sealing of trial exhibits. "The surveys reveal, country-by-country, the factors driving customers to buy Apple products versus competitive products such as Android," court documents state. The results break down which demographics are most satisfied with Apple’s products, and how different demographics respond to different features. The results also show how consumer preferences differ country to country.

Apple is asking the results of these surveys only be shown to the jury when proceedings begin next week. Language in the joint motion states, "Knowing what Apple thinks about its customer base preferences is extremely valuable to Apple competitors because it would allow them to infer what product features Apple is likely to offer next, when, and in what markets."

gdubs• 13 years ago

The Isaacson biography talks a bit about, if I recall correctly, how a lot of post-game analysis done on apple products is meant to institutionalize knowledge gained during the development process.

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

Please also stop perpetuating the fake Henry Ford quote about faster horses.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877934

aggie• 13 years ago

It's interesting to hear about the historical facts (thanks for sharing) but I have to disagree with your position.

The quotation is a concise and eloquent means of making a point about consumer opinion that is true in some cases, even if not in the historical case being exemplified. The historical accuracy is not important when it isn't integral to the argument being made.

I could make a similarly weak argument about your word choice: "quote" is a verb, "quotation" is a noun, but the use of "quote" as a noun is concise and communicates the intended meaning without causing any problems.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

There is a difference between using focus groups to decide if you should build a phone with an entirely new OS for touch screens and using one to see just how badly people need copy and paste for v1.

lloeki• 13 years ago

> "Apple is famous for eschewing market research and focus groups during the creation of new products. However, it turns out the company does research consumer sentiment on existing products in order to optimize future designs."

This is not antithetic: Apple is not surveying customers what they want next, but what is good or bad in the current products. Paraphrasing the Ford quote, Apple asks customers what they like and don't like with their current horses, not what kind of horses they want them to make next.

This is key to the "Don't ask customers what they want" argument (which is _not_ "Don't ask customers anything"): people don't know what they want, people have problems, and we are here to discover and solve those problems. Once faced with a properly designed solution, more often than not from the user point of view it will seem obvious in retrospect, so much so that it could be qualified as what they really wanted in the first place but didn't know they did.

> Can we stop perpetuating this myth please?

So the myth really is "Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers". He (Apple) did listen, but just ignored people telling him "I want this to work that way". Hence the shouts and tears when Apple regularly pushes new stuff down one's throat, bruising our hacker's analytical prides in the process.

samspenc• 13 years ago

> When asked why he bristled at his peers’ suggestion, Johnson responded, "We didn't test at Apple.”

That is pretty funny, obviously he didn't realize JC Penney is a completely different beast from Apple. People shop at JC Penney for price drops, not for quality products.

tlogan• 13 years ago

Maybe instead of saying "you should listen to your customer", we should say "you should observe and learn from your customers".

r0s2• 13 years ago

It seems like there's two sides to creating demand for a product, natural customer desire and customer desire plasticity.

Of course, focusing on both is the best approach. Personally, I've never gleaned the appeal of apple products. They don't seem simple or intuitive such as how they're sold, from my perspective. Maybe this is my advanced user perspective talking, but it seems like just another UI with a different terminology and tropes. A new interface to memorize. So from this perspective, the trick is getting users to want to invest time and money in that new system. In that, apple is quite successful.

babesh• 13 years ago

Yeah sure, that trickery is what makes iOS so easy to use for very young children. Time to put away the blinders and put yourself in the perspective of other people.

r0s2• 13 years ago

iOS isn't a full open computing environment, any simple interface is just as "intuitive", compare to android or WP8.

MisterBastahrd• 13 years ago

CEOs who don't listen to their customers end up unemployed quickly.

kstenerud• 13 years ago

Some important things to note:

1. Apple spent many decades innovating things that customers weren't that interested in. It's only within the last few years that Apple really captured the public's imagination.

2. You don't ask customers to tell you what revolutionary product they want, because 99.9999% of the time they can't even imagine it. Imagining it is YOUR job (provided you're in the business of carving out new industries). You DO, however, ask customers about products that already exist, once they've had time to get used to them.

Steve Jobs knew the difference. He (usually) listened when it was appropriate to listen.

supercanuck• 13 years ago

Never?

mandeepj• 13 years ago

I think the title is wrong. Steve jobs listened to his customers and their feedback but never asked them - what should we develop next or what type of computer, music player or phone you like to have?

Why Steve Jobs Never Listened to His Customers

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