Chapter 8

More on Product Strategy

Design Is How It Works

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

—Steve Jobs

Many people working under Steve in those early days didn’t fully recognize what they were seeing. I recently ran into Dennis Matthews, who had been Apple’s head of technical publishing years earlier. Referring to my first book, The Steve Jobs Way, he told me, “When I read your book, I got it. What hit me was that what we had been doing in those years [after Steve left] wasn’t about the product. We were no longer a product company. We were doing functionality of technology. We were looking at things like how to build better software without asking, ‘What will this mean to the user?’ ”

Product Development Decisions

Those comments of Dennis’s reminded me of the project mentioned earlier that I had worked on during my years at IBM—designing the system that would sell tickets for BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, which was the high-speed rail transit system then under construction for the San Francisco area. The IBM project involved designing and building the machines that riders would buy their tickets from in each station. The concept required that you would have to register in advance and receive a personal code number. When you got to the station, you would enter your code and then feed coins or bills into the machine to purchase a ticket.

When the BART machines were pretty nearly finished, we told our employees to call on their family members and anybody else they could corral, to come in and try out the machines. On one Saturday, we must have had close to a thousand people show up to take part in our user trials.

It was a disaster, an unbelievable disaster. After feeding in your money, there was a long wait before anything happened. People would think the machine wasn’t working and just start pushing buttons. Then they finally gave up and walked away, thinking they had lost their money.

The machines would only accept bills that were slid in with the correct orientation—face side up, the correct end of the bill going in first. If you slid the bill in wrong or if the bill was a little crumpled, the machine would slide it back out again. One more source of user frustration.

It took almost a year to redesign the system, work out the bugs, and get a user interface that made sense. Happily for us, BART wasn’t ready on schedule, either; their delay gave us the time we needed to rethink our vision for the machines. The new, redesigned fare machines were ready in time for the opening of BART.

Those machines later became the prototype for the ATMs you now find at every bank, shopping mall, gas station, and just about everywhere in between.

But IBM doesn’t make those machines, and there’s a management principle to be learned from that truth. Steve Jobs was in the computer business. No one would have blamed him if he had held to that focus and kept Apple making nothing but computers. But he had a broader vision than that. He saw that the technological expertise of the company could be stretched in unexpected ways.

IBM, in contrast, did not want to have to deal with the consumer, and in fact refused to have the IBM logo appear on the BART ticket machines. (Though they did later get into the personal computer business, it went against the culture of the company, and they didn’t stay in it.) Nobody at IBM recognized the vast opportunity offered by what became the global market for ATM machines. It was a product to be used by consumers and so didn’t fit with how the company saw itself. I came to feel that this was a defining moment for IBM, a failure that led to the decline in IBM’s fortunes.

When you’re faced with a decision about a new product development that seems outside your current product arena, think like Steve Jobs—not like IBM. Stretch and apply your expertise in unexpected ways.

So how was Steve’s approach different from the IBM mind-set?

Setting Standards: Design

Steve’s concept of design was best captured in a line that he would sometimes throw at Apple teams that weren’t meeting his standard: “Design isn’t just what the product looks like or even what it feels like. Design is how it works.”

Do you remember what it felt like to use an iPod for the first time? The iPod wasn’t the world’s first MP3 player—it was just the first to combine great looks with an interface that you knew how to use as soon as you picked it up. It just worked intuitively. As of this writing 10 years later, no company has an equivalent product, a viable competitor, for the iPod.

Remember that an eye-catching appearance is just one part of what needs to be a cohesive whole. Steve was the model of a man for whom there was no aspect of a product that was too small to do right.

Setting Standards: Simplicity

Another of Steve’s leadership mantras was simplicity. As one prime example, he demanded that the iPod not have any buttons on it, not even an on/off switch. This seemed weird and undoable to the engineers working on the project, but Steve wouldn’t bend. The engineers were pushed to their limits and finally stumbled on an idea that solved the problem: the scroll wheel. He used to talk about this as “one of my mantras,” insisting that “simple can be harder than complex.” Expanding on this idea to a journalist not long after he had returned from the NeXT detour, he said, “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”1

Setting Standards: Secrecy

When Steve returned to Apple, one of the values he demanded was absolute secrecy. It was drummed into new employees from the very first—incorporated in a very specific confidentiality agreement they had to sign, and stressed very strongly in the new-employee training. By then he had come to the vision of creating products with design and technology far ahead of what anybody else was doing. He understood very clearly that he couldn’t jump the gun on other companies if Apple people in the know were even just a little careless about mentioning a detail here and a detail there. In an environment like that, your competition may turn out to be only a step behind in bringing out an imitation product that includes some of the best features of your latest hot new thing.

In addition, by that time he was convinced that you didn’t ship great products by announcing a release date well in advance and then having to stick to it. You created great products by continuing to refine them until you were satisfied that every aspect—every aspect—had been honed to the point of meeting the very highest standards.

That’s why Apple doesn’t announce products months in advance.

There is a powerful side benefit of this strategy: the technology press and bloggers worldwide generate a great buzz with their guesses about what the next product or product upgrade will be—building greater and greater anticipation and millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity until the launch date finally arrives.

For employees, this level of secrecy is uncomfortable. The Apple campus is like a fortress. The culture of secrecy runs so deep that Apple employees are careful about hanging out together after hours. And when outside their own workplace together with members of their team—even within the Apple campus—they avoid even whispering about what they’re working on.

Even office space is changed to support a new project team. The carpenters appear and quickly put up new walls and security doors. These new protected spaces are called lockdown rooms. Information is so segregated that people working on one team of a new project are kept completely in the dark about what the other teams on the same project are doing, except for the pieces of specific information they may need for doing their own work effectively. The antenna team is told only what they absolutely need to know about the shape of the case. The team designing the case is kept in the dark about the software design. And so on.

The company understands, by the way, that it takes the secrecy thing a little far; there is a hint of humor about its loose-lips-sink-ships mentality. I was a little surprised when I first noticed a T-shirt on sale at the Apple employees’ store with bold printing across the front that read:

I VISITED THE APPLE CAMPUS

BUT THAT’S ALL I’M ALLOWED TO SAY

Maintaining Control of Quality

Apple has been criticized for keeping a chokehold control over applications for the iPhone. I’ve never understood the criticism. Millions of people choose Apple products because they all know that anything that comes from the Steve Jobs factory is going to be miles better and phenomenally more satisfying to use than any competitive product. Steve understood without even needing to think about it that he could only maintain that quality with the iPhone if the apps available for it—being created by thousands of people outside Apple—met the high standards of the phone itself.

Compare that to the apps for Google’s Android operating system that runs so many products made by iPhone competitors. Any teenager with a little time on his hands and a bit of technical or programming skill can create an Android app and make it available on the Android Market sites. A great many of the Android apps are poorly designed and not much good for anything more than frustrating the users. Google does not see this as a reflection on its own reputation and the reputation of the cell phone manufacturers that run the Google software. Their decision not to maintain control of the quality of the apps flies in the face of everything Steve Jobs stood for, and customers suffer the annoyance and frustration of trying to deal with applications that simply don’t work.

Facing Up to Criticism

If you manage to conceive of a radically new product and bring it to market while remaining true to your vision, be prepared for the likely onslaught of criticism. Steve experienced that when the Macintosh was first introduced. The same thing happened again years later. So-called experts and journalists warned that Apple was making a huge and costly misstep when Steve announced the first Apple store. The company had zero experience in retailing, which is a notoriously difficult field to survive in, let alone show a significant profit; established, nationwide retail chains go out of business regularly because they are unable to remain profitable.

But once Steve had the vision of what he wanted to do and had made certain that his instincts aligned with his goal, he stuck by his decision and followed his gut.

And what happened? As Apple opened more and more stores, the critics changed their tune. I noted earlier that on a per-square-foot measure, the Apple stores were generating far more sales than any other national retail chain in the United States. That was true even though discount retailers were selling the same Apple products at reduced prices!

The moral is, make your goal something you strongly believe in, make certain you have a clear vision of how it will benefit your customers, process enough information to confirm you are moving in the right direction, and then stand by your decisions.

And be prepared to withstand the criticism of people who don’t have the facts and the determination that you do.

Steve’s Legacy: The Power of the User Interface

Every January in Las Vegas, tens of thousands of technology people gather in a vast convention hall for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which has been the largest industrial show held anywhere in the world. In 2012, I was struck by what I saw there. It was as if Steve Jobs had been consulted by one company after another after another to help them conceive and craft products that were born out of a clear corporate vision. Sure, I was seeing plenty of the usual run-of-the-mill, copycat “Our competitor has one of these, so now we’re offering our own just to keep up.” But I was also seeing plenty of Apple-inspired products that showed a true vision.

And what was the distinguishing mark of the vision products? Easy: a well-thought-out, well-conceived user interface. At one booth after another, people were actually using that term: user interface.

In other words, ease of use—which also includes users being readily able to understand what they can do with the product. Think what the telephone became in our lives. It became a device run by incredibly complex technology, yet you never have to think about the technology. When the phone rings, you just pick it up and answer—you don’t even give it a second thought.

In a similar way, when you get in your car, you turn the key and just drive off. You don’t need to know anything about the flow of gasoline into the engine, or the pistons driving up and down, or adjusting the gas/air mixture, or how the drive force gets from the engine to the wheels. The fascination Steve Jobs had for cars was part of this emphasis, and he wanted to make the Macintosh and every Apple product since then just as simple and obvious as starting a car and driving away.

As a result, every product Apple created under Steve is so intuitive, it becomes so much a part of you, that you hardly need to think about it in order to be able to use it effectively. The inner workings become invisible. That’s why his products are usable among a range of people, from kids as young as five to people in care facilities for the elderly.

That was one of the crucial things Apple lost in the years that Steve wasn’t there. The company began working in what I saw as the Microsoft model. They became caught up in building pieces of technology to make the products work, instead of always asking, “How is this going to help the user?” and “How can we design this feature so users will discover it and figure out for themselves how to use it?”

Looking Ahead

Those products you have in development right now or the one product you’re betting on so heavily—how close can you come to creating a new standard?

Sure, it’s a tough target to aim for. You and I both know that in their entire career, most people will never achieve this goal in a single thing they do. The much-admired Apple consultant and coach Arynne Simon used to say, “If you don’t aim for the sky, you’ll never hit the bell tower.”

Notes

1. Ira Sager, Peter Burrows, and Andy Reinhardt, “Back to the Future at Apple,” BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998.