Discovering products
Matt at 37Signals dug this quote up out of a post on Cult of Mac. It recounts John Sculley's meeting with Steve Jobs in which Steve described his meeting with Edwin Land, the inventor/ founder of the Polaroid camera:
Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”
And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?”
Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed — it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery.
I think the exchange is outstanding on so many levels, not the least of which in the way it quietly denigrates customer research, particularly customer research, for the purposes of breakthrough products or services. For incremental change, it's great. You're polling the audience for feature enhancements. That's right in the market research wheelhouse. But when it comes to breakthrough change . . . as Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
For revolutionary change, you need someone, or a team of people, who not only understand the specific value denials that need to be addressed but who also have the creative prowess and technical expertise to engineer the right solution. But for people who can do this, people who have been tinkerers and inventors their whole lives, it's not as hard as it might sound. They've been working on turning ideas into real things for years. It's just a part of who they are.
They just know how to make the right thing because they've done it before. Even if it's new to the world, they can see it plain as day right in front of them. Those products have always been there, waiting on their moment to be discovered. And once discovered, all that's left is the small matter of breathing life into them and polishing them for inspection by the world.
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