#281 Working with Steve Jobs

What I learned from rereading Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes ---- Follow one of my favorite podcasts Invest Like The Best [2:01] We're going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence. [2:01] I'm not remotely interested in being just good. [3:00] Gentlemen, this is the most important play we have. It's the play we must make go. It's the play that we will make go. It's the play that we will run again, and again, and again. [4:00] In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you're trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it. [4:00] A significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional, to achieve not just a something, or even an everything, but a specific and well-chosen thing. [6:00] Every day at Apple was like going to school, a design-focused, high-tech, product-creation university. [8:00] A story about Steve’s clarity of thought. [9:00] Although Steve's opinions and moods could be hard to anticipate, he was utterly predictable when it came to his passion for products. He wanted Apple products to be great. [11:00] The decisiveness of Steve Jobs. [16:00] Steve wasn't merely interested in paying lip service to this goal. He demanded action. Steve found the time to attend a demo review so he could see it. His involvement kept the progress and momentum going. [17:00] Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Hack away the unessential. [17:00] People do not care about your product as much as you do. You have to make it simple and easy to use right from the start. [18:00] Steve Jobs believed that stripping away nonessential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and easier to use over time. [19:00] Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success by Ken Segall [22:00] Don’t rest on your laurels. Steve said: “I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.” [24:00] The sooner we started making creative decisions the more time there was to refine and improve those decisions. (The sooner you start the more time you will have to get it right.) [26:00] The simple transaction of buying a song, and of handing over a credit card number to Apple in order to so, became part of what Steve had begun calling “the Apple experience." As a great marketer, Steve understood that every interaction a customer had with Apple could increase or decrease his or her respect for the company. As he put it, a corporation "could accumulate or withdraw credits" from its reputation, which is why he worked so hard to ensure that every single interaction a customer might have with Apple-from using a Mac to calling customer support to buying a single from the iTunes store and then getting billed for it-was excellent. —— Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli (Founders #265) [29:00] Studying great work from the past provides the means of comparison and contrast and lets us tap into the collective creativity of previous generations. The past is a source of the timeless and enduring. [29:00] Design is how it works. —Steve Jobs [31:00] Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham (Founders #275, 276, 277) [34:00] Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney. (Founders #178) [37:00] Our clarity of purpose kept us on track. [38:00] Concentrating keenly on what to do helped us block out what not to do. [40:00] Steve Jobs on the importance of working at the intersection of liberal arts and technology: “The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users. The users don't have to come to them, they come to the user.” [42:00] Steve Jobs provided his single-minded focus on making great products, and his vision motivated me. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  When Vince Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team had gone 11 straight seasons without a winning record. Upon arriving at training camp as their new head coach, Lombardi made an immediate and indelible first impression. After leading the players to a meeting room, Lombardi waited in front of a blackboard as the players sat down. He picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak. "Gentlemen," he said, "we have a great deal of ground to cover. We're gonna do things a lot differently than they've been done here before. We're going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process, we will catch excellence."

• 0:43David Senra?

  He paused and stared, his eyes moving from player to player. The room was silent. "I'm not remotely interested in being just good," he said with an intensity that startled them all. Lombardi soon followed up with a clear-cut description of the specific thing they would perfect. "One play, one single running play. Gentlemen, this is the most important play we have. It's the play we must make go. It's the play that we will make go. It's the play that we will run again and again and again." This is the power of focusing on and perfecting one thing. You wouldn't think there was so much to say about a single running play,

• 1:26David Senra?

  but John Madden described attending a coaching clinic where Lombardi talked about the power sweep, and only the power sweep, for eight hours. Through practice after practice, drill after drill, game after game, and season after season, the Packers honed and refined Lombardi's power sweep. Even though opposing teams knew the play was coming, they couldn't stop it. Lombardi built his victories on an openly declared challenge. "To beat the Packers, you must beat the power sweep." Over the following seven years, the Packers won five championships. A step by step, year by year progression through the ranks from worst to best to legends.

• 2:11David Senra?

  All built on the foundations of one humble running play. Initially described on the blackboard and then executed exquisitely on the field over and over again. In any, this sentence is so important. In any complex effort, communicating a well articulated vision for what you're trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it. It may seem like a stretch to draw a comparison between winning football games in Green Bay and developing web browser software in Cupertino. But a significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental

• 2:51David Senra?

  and intentional to achieve not just a something or even an everything, but a specific and well chosen thing. To take words and turn them into a vision and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results. Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches. That is an excerpt from a book that I've read three or four times now. And the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs and it was written by Ken Kocienda. Okay, so before I jump back into the book, I want to tell you why I'm reading this book for the third or fourth time. So even though this is episode 281, there's actually more than 281 episodes of Founders.

• 3:36David Senra?

  There's at least eight unnumbered bonus episodes. And one of those unnumbered bonus episodes is an episode that I've previously done on the book that I'm holding in my hand. And so not numbering the bonus episodes was a giant mistake because I can't reference them. As you hear over and over again, how I'm constantly referencing past episodes of Founders because I don't think about this as separate episodes. I just think about this as just one giant. 400-hour-long conversation on the history of entrepreneurship that you and I are having. And so I want to jump into the introduction where Ken tells us what this book is about. This book is about my 15 years at Apple, my efforts to make great software while I was there, and the stories and observations I want to relate about those times. If you want to know what it was like to give a demo to Steve Jobs, or what made Apple's products' culture special, read on. Every day at Apple was like going to school.

• 4:21David Senra?

  A design-focused, high-tech, product-creation university. And he talks about how intense the work environment was, and that Steve had unbelievably high standards in everything, which we're going to go into a lot today. Most of my highlights, I'm going to really focus the highlights on just the parts of the book that are about Steve Jobs. There's a lot of great detail in here for anybody building a product, but most of it is going to be about Steve Jobs today. With that intensity came an insistence on doing things right. And without explicitly trying to do so, we developed an approach to work that proved particularly effective. And so the intensity of Steve Jobs jumps off the pages of this book. When I got to this section, it made me think of one of my favorite quotes by Warren Buffett, and he shares that same intensity. He says, "Intensity is the price of excellence."

• 5:04David Senra?

  And so a main theme of the book is that Steve did not want to sit around and have a bunch of meetings and talk about hypotheticals. He wanted to physically see the work. So they pushed all their work forward through a series of demos, and in many cases, him telling you specifically, "Hey, what I want to see next." So he says, "There weren't any company handbooks describing these elements." So he was just naming, I skipped over a bunch, but he's just naming like, you know, some traits that Apple used to develop their products. But this is the main point. There weren't any company handbooks describing these elements. Nobody outlined this list in a new employee orientation. Our approach flowed from the work. This happened from the top down, stemming from the unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs.

• 5:46David Senra?

  We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop. And we had very few actual eureka moments. Instead, this is the main point of the book. Instead, we move forward in stepwise fashion from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each promising concept and trying to come up with new ways to make it better. This next section I've thought about for years. So according to Amazon, I first ordered this book on January 7, 2019. I probably read it shortly after I received it. There's a lot of reasons I admire Steve Jobs, why I consider him the greatest entrepreneur of all time. When it comes to building products and building a valuable company, he's brilliant.

• 6:28David Senra?

  If I had to say the single trait I admire the most about him and the one that I don't even understand how it's capable that he was able to do it is his clarity of thought. Steve is the clearest thinker out of any single other person that I've covered so far on the podcast. And when I think of Steve's clarity of thought, I think about this quick story from Ken's book. Steve was at the center of all circles. He made all the important product decisions. He used these demo reviews as his chief means of deciding how Apple's software should look and feel and function. From my standpoint, as an individual programmer, demoing to Steve was like visiting the oracle of Delphi. The demo was my question. Steve's response was the answer.

• 7:12David Senra?

  While the pronouncements from the Greek oracle often came in the form of confusing riddles, that wasn't true with Steve. He was always easy to understand. He would either approve a demo, or he would request to see something different next time. Although Steve's opinions and moods could be hard to anticipate, he would... This is such... I love this. He was utterly predictable when it came to his passion for products. He wanted Apple's products to be great, and he insisted on being involved in the process as it went along. Whenever Steve reviewed a demo, he would say, often with highly detailed specificity, what he wanted to happen next.

• 7:54David Senra?

  He was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible, and he was willing to invest his own time, effort, and influence to see that they were. Through looking at demos, asking for specific changes, then reviewing the changed work again later on, and giving a final approval before we could ship, Steve could make a product turn out like he wanted. Much like the Greek oracle, Steve foretold the future. And so Ken is going to describe what it was like to demo to Steve Jobs. There's a bunch of highlights over several pages. This part of the book is absolutely fantastic, and I love how he's going to end this section because Steve only speaks four sentences.

• 8:37David Senra?

  Goes back to being really easy to understand, and there's no ambiguity in what Steve wants to happen next. And in this case, Ken, previously he'd worked on, he helped create the Safari browser. This is like, you know, maybe 10 years before where we are in the book. Worked on the original keyboard for the iPhone. In this case, he is demoing, this is very soon before, about a year and a half before Steve dies unfortunately, he's demoing the keyboard on the iPad, which has not been released yet where we are in the story. And I should tell you, so I was going back through the index of the book after I was done last night with all my highlights, and I just went through the index to make sure I hit all the Steve Jobs parts. And I thought this was fantastic because this part, this is in the chapter called "The Demo," right?

• 9:21David Senra?

  The part is not described, "The Demo," in the index. This part is described in the index as "The Decisiveness of Steve Jobs," which is a perfect description of it because we're going to go into it right now, right? He goes, "His eyes met mine. His look wasn't obviously unfriendly or threatening, but surely he knew his unblinking gaze could intimidate people in my position, and it certainly had that effect on me." This idea that when Steve would stare at you, he wouldn't blink, I've heard like dozens of stories about this in, you know, the 10 or so books I've read on him. "I saw his look as a signal that he wasn't going to let me pull the wool over his eyes. He was now ready to see my demo." Scott stood up and crossed behind Steve's chair. Okay, let's look at the demo. Steve, this is Ken.

• 10:06David Senra?

  He worked on the iPhone keyboard. He has some tablet keyboard designs to show you. Steve was still looking at me. Continuing the demo introduction from where Scott left off, I said, "Right, there are two designs. One has more keys, like a laptop keyboard, and the other has bigger keys, like a scaled up iPhone. We're thinking of offering both. Try the zoom key to switch between them." Steve then slowly swiveled his chair around to the demo table. He looked down. In front of him, the iPad was in landscape. Steve moved his eyes all over the iPad's screen, rotating his head slowly in small figure eights in what I took to be an attempt to get a view of every corner of the display.

• 10:50David Senra?

  After several long moments of study, he reached out to tap the zoom key, to switch the keyboard to my bigger keys design. No reaction. No hint of what he was thinking. Steve was like an expert high stakes poker player checking his whole cards for the first time after receiving them from the dealer. Now that the screen looked different, Steve started his study all over again. He took his time, taking a solid thirty seconds to absorb every detail on the screen. He turned to look straight at me. "We only need one of these, right?" Not what I was expecting. Steve was still looking at me, and so with a half shrug, I said, "Yeah, uh, I guess so."

• 11:35David Senra?

  Steve sized me up a little and then asked, "Which one do you think we should use?" A simple question clearly directed at me and only me. Steve didn't shift in his chair or motion toward anyone else in the room. It was my demo, and he wanted me to answer. "Well, I've been using these demos for the past few days, and I've started to like the keyboard layout with the bigger keys. I think I could learn to touch type on it, and I think other people could too."

• 12:03David Senra?

  Okay. There's a picture, uh, there's draw, all these cool drawings in the book. And one of this is just Steve staring directly at you on the previous page. And this is what I think of.

• 12:15David Senra?

  This is what I think of when, when, um, when Ken's about to describe what happens next. Steve continued looking at me as he thought about my answer. He never moved his eyes to anyone or anyone else. He was completely present. There he was, seriously considering my idea about the next big Apple product. It was thrilling. He thought for a few seconds, then he announced the demo verdict. Okay, we'll go with the bigger keys. That was it. The Oracle of Apple had spoken. The demo was over. Before I read a few more sentences, go back to what the index describes this part. I'm going to go back to a few pages where I jotted it down. The decisiveness of Steve Jobs.

• 12:58David Senra?

  Remember this, when Ken compares and contrasts the way Apple builds products, relying on the taste and judgment of the founder with how Google makes their products. So then once he says the demo was over, Scott walked a couple of steps towards the door, giving me the cue that it was time for me to go. And Ken talks about, hey, when you're doing demos to Steve, this is the price to be in the room. If he feels you have no valuable insight, you're never going to see him again. Ken was able to demo several times. He says, you have to make substantive contributions to the discussion, to discussion with him. Uh, as a way, that's the way to earn future invitations. That is the price to be in the room. Can you make substantive contributions to the discussions on the products and help push them forward? Help make them better. That's all Steve cared about.

• 13:43David Senra?

  I'm going to go to the punchline, which happens a few pages later. He's describing, Ken is describing, again, a main theme of the book, why these demos are so important. Apple must make great, this is known of myself years ago. Apple must make great software to get there. They use a series of iterations in the form of demos. Now Ken says, demos served as the primary means to turn ideas into software. This statement includes the assumption that Apple made making great software an important goal to begin with. We did, and that came straight from Steve. He set the company's priorities. And he stressed in public statements and internal communications that making great software was a core corporate focus.

• 14:23David Senra?

  What's more, Steve wasn't merely interested in paying lip service to this goal. He demanded action. And so the software team produced demos and a steady stream. And whenever there was interesting new work, Steve found the time to attend a demo review so he could see it. He's showing through his actions, right? Actions express priority, right? One of the best maxims that I've ever come across. Actions express priorities. He's showing through his actions what's important. His time is extremely valuable. He's like, hey, I'm in this room. I'm reviewing on a very micro level what all parts of this product are going to look, feel, and operate like, right? Steve found the time to attend a demo review so he could see it. His involvement kept the progress and momentum going. All of this, everything I'm reading to you is happening over many, many pages after

• 15:07David Senra?

  the demo because we're learning like what can learn from this demo with Steve, right? And he's going into detail. Two things he's going to pull out that was important to Steve. You have to put yourself in your customer's shoes and you have to hack away the unessential. Steve looked carefully at the software and asked me succinct questions to see if the work could be made simpler. This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives. This is something Steve talked about over and over again from the time he was a young man in the 1980s till right before he died. Consider a mom who's, they just, people just do not care about your product as much as you do.

• 15:52David Senra?

  You have to make it simple and easy to use right from the get-go. And so this idea of putting yourself in the customer's shoes and even attaching like a specific example of a customer helps you make better product decisions. This is an example of that. Consider a mom who's busy with her daily routine. On a day, she was worried about her 16-year-old son, who was homesick from high school and was taking care of himself. She was running a few minutes late getting to the office because there was bad traffic on the road. She had a report due later in the afternoon and she was trying to fit in one more email reply as she headed down the hallway towards the next meeting. Steve believed she would do better with a product that wasn't loaded down with everythingamabob the product designers could dream up. This is hacking away the unessential. This is some Bruce Lee shit right here. He believed that stripping away nonessential features

• 16:34David Senra?

  made products easier for people to learn from the start and easier to use over time. He wanted products and their software to speak for themselves. He realized that nobody would be standing over the shoulder of a person who is having their first experience with software, carefully describing every nuance of every feature. Now, that is a huge, really important. So what they're talking about there is like, hey, let's say you're the one coming up with the demo. You're the programmer. Steve's not going to let you sit there and describe your thinking behind it. Because are you going? And he used this example. One time he called, I read this book called Insanely Simple. I made a podcast about it in the past. And it was a guy that did, that worked in for the, on the ads for Apple.

• 17:17David Senra?

  And he, and Steve did this exact same thing with him too. In meetings, he would try to say, okay, this is the thinking behind this ad campaign. Steve's like, shut up, just show me the ads. And he says something like, are you going to be there when I see this in a magazine or on a billboard? No, then shut up. I don't want to hear it. I'm going to experience it like the customer is going to experience. So same thing here. He's like, he realized that nobody would be standing over the shoulder of a person who's having their first experience with software, carefully describing every nuance of every feature. And so his point is, wouldn't it be better if software was clear and intuitive right off the bat? And this ends the section. This is what I absolutely love. I chuckled to myself over how much time I've spent thinking about this iPad demo and how much Steve taught me in one meeting where he spoke just four sentences. So now he goes back in time.

• 18:01David Senra?

  One of the first things he worked on was creating the Safari browser. At this time in Apple history, I think this is the maybe late 1990s, maybe early 2000s. They were still, if you bought an Apple device, it would have Microsoft Internet Explorer on it as part of the deal that, that Steve worked out with Bill Gates when he got that investment from Microsoft. I think it was 1987, if I'm not mistaken. And in this case, they're like, okay, we're gonna make our own browser. And with classic, like, very classic Steve Jobs, he's not going to give you a series of priorities. He's going to give you one priority. The name of this chapter is "One Simple Rule." And it says, "Steve Jobs himself had decided how he would judge our browser as a product. The focus would be on one thing: speed.

• 18:44David Senra?

  Steve wanted our browser to be fast, to be really fast, much faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is the product that we aim to replace. And this is why Steve reasoned that a speedy new Apple browser would be the best way for a customer to feel good about our replacement browser right away. Steve thought speed was the long-term key to better browsing. So making a high-performance browser became our top priority, our definition for greatness." And so as a result of Ken's work on the Safari browser, he got a chance to see how Steve prepared for these product announcements, these product presentations. Just want to read one paragraph. This is not gonna surprise you or I, because me and you have been talking about this, the importance of practice over and over and over again.

• 19:29David Senra?

  And it shouldn't surprise you or I that Steve practiced a lot. "I would learn more about how Steve prepared for these big splash product announcements. Three weeks or a month before the keynote itself, Steve would start rehearsing with portions of his slide deck. Slowly, day by day, he would build the show by stepping through it as he wanted to present it at the keynote. This was one of Steve's great secrets of success as a presenter: he practiced a lot. He went over and over and over the material until he had the presentation honed and he knew it cold." And then throughout the book, Ken also adds these stories of some ideas that Steve would talk about, both publicly and internally, that he thought were very valuable.

• 20:14David Senra?

  This is one of them, the fact that Steve Jobs did not believe on resting on your laurels, that once you do something great, then the next step is try to do something else that's great. At Apple, there was never much time to savor success. Steve Jobs explained this aspect of the company ethos in an interview with Brian Williams. Williams asked Steve where he thought he fit in the American family of thinkers and inventors. At first, Steve attempted to brush off the question, but when Williams pressed him, Steve said, "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful and not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next." And then Ken says, "I found Steve's approach could work as well after a failure as it could after a success."

• 20:57David Senra?

  And so then Ken goes into great detail how difficult it was to build the keyboard on the iPhone. So the iPhone internally was codename "purple." And I just want to pull out, because I want to pull out a few paragraphs here, because I think this is the main idea, really, the main idea behind the entire book, which is demos just help you push the evolution of your product forward, because the one essential demo expectation was progress. So he says, "Exactly how we collaborated mattered. It reduced to a basic idea: We showed demos to each other. Every major feature on the iPhone started as a demo, and for a demo to be useful to us, it had to be concrete and specific. We needed concrete and specific demos to guide our work,

• 21:39David Senra?

  since even an unsophisticated idea is hard to discuss constructively without an artifact to illustrate it. At Apple, we built our work on this basic fact: demos made us react, and the reactions were essential. Direct feedback on one demo provided the impetus to transform it into the next. Demos were the catalyst for creative decisions, and we found that the sooner we started making creative decisions, the more time, that's such an important point, the sooner we started making creative decisions, the more time there was to refine and improve those decisions, to backtrack if needed, to forge ahead if possible. Concrete and specific demos were the handholds and footholds that helped boost us from the bottom of the conceptual valley

• 22:22David Senra?

  so we could scale the heights of worthwhile work." Making a succession of demos was the core of the process of taking an idea from the intangible to the tangible. Making demos is hard. It involves overcoming apprehensions about committing time and effort to an idea that you are not sure is right. At Apple, we had to expose that idea. Excuse me. At Apple, we then had to expose that idea and demo to the scrutiny of sharp-eyed colleagues who were never afraid to level-pointed criticism. The psychological hurdle only grows taller with the knowledge that most demos, almost all of them, fail in the absolute dead-end sense of the word.

• 23:05David Senra?

  The purple team, which is the iPhone team, the iPhone team rarely worked without concrete and specific artifacts. That's important to you and I because the iPhone is the most successful consumer product of all time. Literally, we had to demonstrate our idea. We couldn't get away with telling. We were required to show. We combined some inspiration, craft, taste, and decisiveness, and we shared our results. We had to work like this because the team didn't accept anything unless it was concrete and specific, a demo showing what we meant. Then we tried out each other's demos and said what we liked and what we didn't and offered suggestions for improvements, which led to more demos and more feedback. This virtuous collaborative cycle. Another insight that Steve Jobs had was the fact that great products make people happy

• 23:50David Senra?

  almost all the time and rarely do the opposite. I'm going to, I'm going to read this section and I'm going to pull up something from what I feel is the best. I mean, every single biography on Steve Jobs I've read, I thought was absolutely fantastic, the best one, if you can only read one. And I wouldn't just read one, but if you only had to read one, that'd be Becoming Steve Jobs, which I just read for the second time on episode 265. And I'll get to Steve's idea of the Apple experience, which you and I can use in our businesses. It'll make sense in one second. Let me go to Ken. Ken says, "We all owned devices that had too many ill-considered, overlapping, and inscrutable features, making the product nearly impossible to understand or use." Apple's whole identity was bound up in not having this problem. Over time, and this is an important part,

• 24:33David Senra?

  designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences, meaning, you know, how frustrating would it be if you were using a device that had what he just called ill-considered, overlapping, and inscrutable features? You're gonna be angry, like temporarily frustrated, right? You don't want to do that to your customers. Designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones. Great products make people happy almost all the time and do the opposite rarely if at all. Why is that important? Or more importantly, why did Steve think that was important? Because Steve said every interaction a customer has increases or decreases the opinion of the company. He calls this idea, which I'm about to read to you, comes from Becoming Steve Jobs, "the Apple experience."

• 25:18David Senra?

  It is brilliant. And it's simple, too. The simple transaction of buying a song and handing over a credit card to Apple in order to do so became part of what Steve had begun calling "the Apple experience." As a great marketer, Steve understood that every interaction a customer had with Apple could increase or decrease his or her respect for the company. As he put it, "A corporation could, quote, 'accumulate or withdraw credits from its reputation,'" which is why he worked so hard to ensure that every single interaction a customer might have with Apple, from using a Mac, to calling customer support, to buying a single from the iTunes Store, and then getting billed for it, was excellence. Why?

• 25:58David Senra?

  Because one bad experience might undo dozens or 100 positive experiences that a customer previously had with your company. So in a few minutes, we're gonna get to the difference in design, the way Steve wanted to design, or Steve did design products in Apple, compared with the data-driven approach that Google uses. And a lot of this goes down, there's like several pages. And essentially, it's just like, a lot of this comes down to taste, to having good taste, which is really hard to figure out, like, what is it? Like, how do you develop good taste? And something that I thought was interesting is like you can compare the way you feel is good taste at this point in your career with great work for the past. So this is why Ken, you and I do this professionally, right? This is what everything what founders is about.

• 26:42David Senra?

  It's like we study great work from the past because there's all these insights that you and I can use in present day. And Ken even adds another layer to why you should study great work for the past because it gives you something to compare to, to see, like to calibrate your taste. Studying great work from the past provides the means of comparison and contrast and lets us tap into the collective creativity of previous generations. The past is a source of the timeless and enduring. When I study the past, I make a point of deciding what I like and sometimes this built up catalog of refined like responses about past works find a suitable outlet and a natural expression in my present day work. And so I was wrong. I thought the next section was about the difference between Google and Apple. We'll get there.

• 27:27David Senra?

  There's actually, now we get, this won't take that long. This is Ken's favorite thing that Steve Jobs ever said. And it's this idea, this quote from Steve, that design is how it works. And so Ken says, "Making software and products appear beautiful in the sense of being visually attractive only goes so far." Steve Jobs once said, "Design is how it works." In fact, this is my favorite thing I've ever heard him say. And in the context he provided around this statement, when he originally made this claim, it was a 2003 New York Times interview discussing the iPod, Steve drove this point home. Or excuse me, Steve drove his point home. Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what a product look like, looks like.

• 28:11David Senra?

  People think it's this veneer, that the designers are handed this box and told, "Make it look good." That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Now Ken jumps in. His message is clear and I agree with it. Shallow beauty in products does not serve people. Product design should strive for a depth, for a beauty rooted in what a product does, not merely in how it looks and feels. Form should follow function, even though this might seem like a strange notion for pixels on a screen. But it's not if you believe the appearance of a product should tell you what it is and how to use it. Objects should explain themselves. It is impossible to overstate how much this matters.

• 28:55David Senra?

  Okay, so now we go into what is really the anti-Steve Jobs model. The note I left myself a few years ago, I think, is still really good. More data will never be enough. You need conviction. You need a point of view. And it's been, what, let's see, almost three years, maybe two and a half years since I last read or at least made a podcast on this book. And I think I'm even deeper in that conviction that taste is something that's very real. I mean, Paul Graham talks about that decade after decade in his essays, that building a great product is not scientific. It's not something that can just be derived from data alone. You have to have taste. And one way to develop taste is through years of practice, which he talks about a lot. And I think it's Hackers and Painters, which is not just a book, but the actual essay.

• 29:39David Senra?

  So it says, "I'll soon share more ideas about what made our Apple approach special. But first, I'll discuss a counter notion, an example of a process that cannot produce iPhone-like excellence. For this, I turned to Douglas Bowman, who was a designer who started at Google in 2006, becoming one of its early visual design leaders. Here's how he justified his departure from Google almost three years later." So he is describing this product development path, this method of product development that Ken finds, I think, grotesque. So he says, this is the designer at Google now, "Without a person at or near the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of design, a company eventually

• 30:23David Senra?

  runs out of reasons for design decisions." So this is, again, the anti-Steve Jobs model. What is the subtitle of this book? Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs played this role that was lacking at Google. So it says, "There's nobody at the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of design. The company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. Without conviction or without taste, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. They reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data." We just, Ken just described. The demo process of Steve literally trusting his judgment, trusting his taste.

• 31:06David Senra?

  What data was involved when he was doing the demo for the iPad keys? There's two keyboards. Steve trusted his taste and picked the one that he liked the most. Right? He got some feedback from the designer, from the person that actually created it, which is Ken. So, okay, yeah, we're gonna go with that. I trust my taste. And that's what shows up in the actual product. It's the opposite of that sentence. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Okay, launch it. Data shows negative effects, back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision. Yes, it is true that a team at Google could not decide between two blues. So they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. Now Ken jumps in with his opinion on this.

• 31:50David Senra?

  Forty-one shades of blue sounds like a lot, but if they were willing to go that far at Google, why not test for 100 or 1,000? If some data is good, more must be better. Right? As Baumann suggests, or as Baumann, excuse me, as Baumann suggests, it isn't. "Google factored out taste from its design process." The note I left right in between these two paragraphs is... So he writes, "Google factored out taste from its design process." I wrote, "While Apple relied on Steve's personal taste." At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that. And we never staged any A/B test for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste and we moved on.

• 32:35David Senra?

  I read Johnny Ive's biography back on episode 178. He tells an exact same, very similar story in that book, working with Steve. I can't remember the name of the computer. It was like, um, I don't know if they were, I think it was maybe early IMAX. When they used to come, like, they were way bigger than they are now. But they'd come in like all these different colors. I'm pretty sure this happened in the late 90s. And there's a line from that book where it says, "Johnny was amazed at the speed with which Jobs gave his approval to the new colors." In most places, that decision would have taken months. Steve did it in a half hour. So it's another example. He's just, "I'm gonna trust my taste. I know that I..." Like, and especially at that point in his career, he's had, you know, two, maybe two and a half decades of practice and experience with designing insanely great products.

• 33:19David Senra?

  In other words, Steve worked himself into a position where he could trust his judgment. And so then Ken goes back into this idea of really explaining the way that they push their products forward, the importance of demos. I'm going to read this to you because I think, first of all, he does a good job of tying in that story, the Vince Lombardi story from the very beginning. It's one of Steve Jobs' most famous quotes, which is, "Focus is about saying no." And so that's what came to mind when I read this section. "There are innumerable ways creative selection can become bogged down, since this working method must be applied consistently over a period of time to yield results. Consequently, our success was as much about what we did not do as what we did. Mostly, we avoided falling into any of the typical product development traps common in Silicon Valley.

• 34:03David Senra?

  For example, we did not talk about projects without examples to ground the discussion. We didn't shuffle around printed specifications or unchanging paper mockups for weeks on end. We did not have an imbalance between influence and involvement, where a senior leader might try to mimic the commanding role of Steve Jobs without the corresponding level of personal engagement." So again, goes back to the idea that Steve demonstrated with his actions how he dedicated his time, what was important to him. It was the opposite of, this is really funny, he calls this the seagull, the seagull manager, and says, so this is like the opposite of Steve Jobs. "A detached, high-level manager making all the key decisions is such a widespread affliction." Detached, remember Steve is not detached, he's in there.

• 34:47David Senra?

  He's making very minute decisions, right? It's such a widespread affliction that it has its own meme. It's called the seagull manager. It describes a top executive who is rarely around but flies in occasionally and unexpectedly from who knows where, lands on your beach, squawks noisily, flaps its wings all over the place, launches itself back into the air, circles overhead, and drops a big pile of you-know-what on everyone and then flies away, leaving the rest of the team to clean up the mess. More things they did not do. We did not establish large, cutting-edge software research departments sequestered from and with a tenuous connection to the designers and engineers responsible for creating and shipping the real products. Steve Jobs famously disbanded such an organization at Apple, which was called the Advanced Technology

• 35:32David Senra?

  Group, surely after he reasserted control over the company in 1997. These kinds of anti-patterns can prevent creative selection from functioning correctly since they block the steady accumulation of positive change in the form of demos while developing a product. And this is where he ties this all together beautifully for you and I. We managed to steer clear of all such pitfalls. If I were to take a stab at explaining the why, I would say that our clarity of purpose kept us on track, in much the same way that Vince Lombardi won football games and Steve Jobs pushed us to make a speedy first version of Safari, since our focus on making great products never wavered. If for no other reason, then that's what Steve demanded.

• 36:15David Senra?

  Perhaps concentrating keenly on what to do helped us block out what not to do. And then this is Steve preaching an idea over and over again throughout the company, none of myself many years ago, which I think still works, is the power of ideas. Edwin Land, Steve, the founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs' hero, changed Apple. Steve took one of Edwin Land's ideas and built his company around it and then repeated it and made sure he taught everybody else in the company why this is important. "The Intersection" is the title of this chapter. It was an idea that helped us. It speaks to the way that Apple valued expertise in both technology and liberal arts. Building a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts is literally

• 36:59David Senra?

  something Edwin Land talked about and did, something Steve Jobs learned from Edwin Land and then Steve Jobs used it at Apple. This is the power of ideas. We use this notion to guide our efforts as we developed and lived on our gadgets, so that they turned out to be more than an agglomeration of the latest CPU, sensors, and software manufactured to scale. We hope to make our products meaningful and useful to people. Unlike the unspoken idea of creative selection, we did talk about working at the intersection among ourselves. There was even a formal Apple University course on the topic, a moderated half-day session to discuss melding technology and liberal arts. The reasons it might be difficult to work at this intersection and why it was essential to keep trying, since the effort lay at the core of the notion

• 37:44David Senra?

  of the, at the core of the Apple notion of a great product, also Edwin Land's notion of a great product, right? Not only was the intersection freely discussed inside the company, but oddly for Apple, the discussion did not stop at the edge of the Cupertino campus. Steve Jobs told everyone what he thought about this topic himself onstage during the keynote presentation to announce the original iPad. Mentioned it multiple times. He mentioned it in interviews back in the 1980s when he was still in his 20s. Mentioned it in the Walter Isaacson book that he's writing in collaboration with Isaacson as he knows he is dying. This is a fundamental idea, an important idea to understand the life and work of Steve Jobs. This is what Steve said about it.

• 38:28David Senra?

  The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users. The users don't have to come to them. They come to the user. That's a really important idea. A few pages later, it's repeated. Steve Jobs did not say products should thwart the user. He said products should come to the user. And then the book ends on a sad note. Ken had been doing a series of demos with Steve. He's talking to his boss, Henry. And it says, "Several months later,

• 39:12David Senra?

  in one of my regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings with Henry to discuss my continuing iPad work, I suggested to him that it might be a good idea to have another demo with Steve to show him multitasking gestures again now that the software was close to its final form. It would give him one more chance to give feedback before we shipped the upgrade, the update to iOS. Henry responded with a shake of his head and a matter of fact, at this point, I think we should go with the multitasking gestures as they are. We finished our chat a few minutes later, and when I left Henry's office and made my way down the hall, I heard his words again in my mind. At this point." Then it hit me. Henry knew. Steve wasn't coming back. About six weeks later, Steve resigned from his position as CEO of Apple.

• 39:56David Senra?

  About six weeks after that, he was gone. And then it only takes Ken one sentence to describe the impact that Steve had on him, that he's had on me, that he's had on you, and millions of other people. Steve Jobs provided his single-minded focus on making great products and his vision motivated. And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, read the book. Anybody building a product should read this book. It should be in your library. It is a no-brainer recommendation. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the very same time. If you want to use the same app that I use to store all of my highlights, I have over 20,000 highlights from the books I read, and I have a bunch of books I still have

• 40:39David Senra?

  to put in there, I use an app called Readwise. And you can test it for 60 days for free to see if you like it as much as I do. The link is down below. It's, or you could just go straight to the URL, which is readwise.io/founders. I spent some time organizing maybe the next 10 or 12 books that I'm covering for the podcast. I'm calling it the murderer's row of history's greatest founders. You will not believe the lineup that I have coming. So I'm looking forward to that. That is 281 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.