Start With the Customer

tl;dr

Don’t get distracted by what you can build. Focus on how it will be used.

Full Quote

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try and sell it. I’ve probably made this mistake more than anybody, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it. … As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?’ Not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?’ And I think that’s the right path to take.

Source

This was one part of a long answer to a question from the floor during the keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997.

The question, relating to a technology that Apple had recently decided to discontinue, is very specific and, remarkably, ends with a personal insult:

Perhaps you can tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years.

Ouch!

Rather than take offence, Jobs’ admits that killing products that people (like the person asking the question presumably) have invested in is difficult, accepts that not all of these decisions will be correct with the benefit of hindsight and apologises for that. But also tries to explain the thinking behind this decision, and in the process provides a great insight to what was prioritised at Apple in that era.

Related

This is actually a follow-up question. The original query prompted an even more memorable response:

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