On Market Insights and User Research
Contrary to popular beliefs, if you listened very carefully between the lines of this 1 hour long lecture with the MBA students in MIT, Jobs did spend a lot of time and energy deeply listening to and understanding customer needs.
It would not have been possible to gain the insight and develop that very informed go to market strategy otherwise
Key lessons on building teams:
- Take a longer time horizon on people
- Resist the urge to do things yourself, when someone on your team screws up, think about how you could train him to improve
- It is very easy to hire people to do things, it is very hard to find smart people to tell you the way things are supposed to be done
- The really good people usually take around 1 year and a half to hire
On Timing
There is always that 5 year window where the market is not really ready yet, where you need to spend a lot of time and effort to push the window open. Beyond that 5 year window, you have around a 5 year period to exploit the market before the next technology curve comes about.
If you hang around MIT or other research labs, you can kind feel it in your bones. Different pieces of technology that come together to make what was not possible before possible. Based on historical observation these things tend to converge in clumps. They are not linear.
The key challenge now for computing is the two segments of conflicting needs. The need for portability versus the need for power. Morse Law and technology innovation makes it inevitable that they converge.