Steven Sinofsky Quotes

Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.

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.

Business owners should think of designers as architects, not decorators.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

It's incredibly important to be - once you do have a product - acutely observational about the trends.

Betting all your funds on the belief that you know what consumers want and are willing to pay for is like jumping into a river to test its depth - you'll need a lot of luck to stay afloat. To have a truly successful product launch, the conversations with your customers must start long before you write your first line of code.

Customers can't always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what's wrong.

Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you'll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.

Every single thing I learned about marketing and building my business, I learned from my mom, and she had never been in the workforce. She just had great practical sense.

You have to understand who your customer is and her motivations and marry it to what's happening in the outside world.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

I'm looking for best practices constantly. Apple has beautiful design, beautiful product, incredibly functional. But mostly it's about picking product, getting behind it, marketing it and introducing it to a customer. What they've done just inspires me.

I think running a business, doing what I've done for the last - since 1996, has taught me so many things because I started from just an idea and then had to figure out how to make it, market it, every single thing from soup to nuts on how to get a product done and out there.

Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.

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.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

I'm an inventor. I don't enjoy running the business.

We're not in the business of shaping consumer demand. We respond to it.

Product management really is the fusion between technology, what engineers do - and the business side.

Every entrepreneur needs ideas, vision, and creativity - no matter what the product or service. Not only that, but the product should truly delight customers and become an essential part of their lives.

Forget 'branding' and 'positioning.' Once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place.

There's not a single business model, and there's not a single type of electronic content. There are really a lot of opportunities and a lot of options and we just have to discover all of them.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.