Wisdom

Table of Contents

Wisdom

When the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. - Jeff Bezos

At a meeting at Amazon, some of the execs were arguing about the customer service experience. Metrics indicated that most calls were picked up within a minute, but there were many complaints that calls would take minutes before being answered. During the meeting, Jeff picked up the phone and called the customer service line and waited > 10 minutes to get an answer. It’s easy to fool yourself with metrics, it’s hard to fool yourself with anecdotes.

Stanley Tang from Doordash found what to do by asking his favorite macaroon store in Palo Alto what troubles they were having. The store showed reams of unfulfilled phone in orders that couldn’t be done because the owner had no delivery drivers, no way to keep track of the orders (outside of pencil and paper), etc. So he talked to other small businesses and found the same problem was common. But they didn’t really know if it was a problem worth pursuing.

They created a website in a day called Palo Alto Delivery, found some restaurant menu PDFs and attached it to the site, and added their phone number to the website to take orders. It looked like this:

Palo Alto Delivery

They then fulfilled all the orders themselves, figured out how to talk to customers, and used google docs to keep track of orders, dispatched drivers and figured out how to route them with apple’s find my friends, and took orders with square. Hacking together solutions to get off the ground helped them iterate, gained a lot of knowledge on how to make the driver dispatch algorithms and how to scale the business.

When Jobs returned to apple in 1997, he was battered by weeks of product review sessions informing him of all the new products apple had launched since he was ousted. He had enough and shouted “Stop! This is crazy.” He grabbed a marker and wrote this on a nearby whiteboard.

- Consumer Pro
Desktop
Portable

Apple should focus on four great products. The rest of them should be canceled.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.

Jobs gave the same advice to Page.

Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Steve Jobs learned to admire simplicity when working at Atari. Atari games came with no manual and needed to be simple enough for anyone to play without instruction. The only instructions for a Star Trek game were:

  1. Insert quarter
  2. Avoid Klingons

It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.

On apple devices, they removed the power button. iDVD, used to burn DVDs, would allow you to drag a file onto a window to burn that file to a DVD.

Jobs wanted users to be able to navigate from any screen to any other screen in 3 clicks.

Integrated devices are simpler. Own the entire experience, from the chips, hardware, software, to the distribution, in Apple stores.

“People are busy. They have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices”

Being in the apple ecosystem was like walking in a Zen garden in Kyoto.

Apple started out way behind many times in its lifetime. Personal Computing, music, cell phones. With the iMac, it couldn’t burn CDs, a huge problem for creatives. Instead, it leapfrogged them with the iTunes store and iPod ecosystem, connecting to a computer.

As well, Jobs was famous for cannibalizing its products – “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will”.

“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.”

If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!” - Henry Ford

Jobs didn’t believe in market research to see what customers wanted. He believed in his intuition, saying that “customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

“The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead.”

“One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs cut him off. “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year—the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year. After a few weeks Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster.”

The unboxing experience of a product is critical to how people later perceive the product. Unpacking is a ritual that heralded the glory of the product. That’s why Apple products had such a different unboxing experience than other products of its time.

Toy Story originally had an edgier and darker tone. John Lasseter and Jobs both agreed to stop product and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. Apple stores were once delayed so that store layouts could be reorganized around activities and not product categories.

For the iPhone, it was originally in an aluminum case. Jobs went to Ive and said “I didn’t sleep last night, because I realized that I just don’t love it”. Ive immediately saw that Jobs was right. The iPhone should’ve been about the display, but the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way.

“Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want, we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.”

When Jobs was a kid, he helped his father build a fence around their backyard. His father told him to take as much care on the back as the front. Nobody will know, the young Jobs said, but the senior responded with “But you will know”. A true craftsmen uses a good piece of wood even for the back of a cabinet against the wall.

He did the same in the Apple II, where he rejected a circuit board design because its chips didn’t line up. The engineers complained that no one would see the inside, but he retorted with his father’s lesson. Once the board was redesigned, he had the team’s engineers names engraved inside the case. “Real artists sign their work”.

“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people, you don’t have to baby them”. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.

Having polite managers allow mediocre people to feel comfortable sticking around.

Jobs believe in serendipity and designed the Pixar building to have unplanned encounters and collaborations. He banned slideshows, since they had people focus on bullet points instead of the bigger picture. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

Jobs worked with the teams designing the silicon but also had a grand vision of what the apple ecosystem should look like. In the 2010s, everything would move to the cloud, and become a digital hub for managing the user’s content.

Sell, Design, Build is a maxim to building great products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231581