Tobias Lutke Quotes

Reducing a product's definition to a list of features and functions ignores the real opportunity - orchestrating technological capability to serve human needs and goals.

You have to know what your users are experiencing.

Good products are built by people who want to use it themselves

With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.

User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.

User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.

The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can't just stay in the lab. And it's not just asking users what they want, it's about seeing what they're doing.

Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.

The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.

It is great to see kits designed specifically with us in mind.

Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.

We're trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better.

Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

In software, it's easy to understand what people want, and it's hard to build. Internet stuff is super easy to build, but it's hard to know what people want.

It's incredibly exciting to know people are using and living with the things I create.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

There's a strength to being able to look at products through a customer's eyes, but it is also dangerous.

You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.

The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

If you want to create a great product, just focus on one person. Make that one person have the most amazing experience ever.

The best design work is really done when you spend more time with people, when you have the opportunity to be of the same mindset and the same incentives as the founder of the business.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.