Stewart Butterfield Quotes

One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.

The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.

Get your product into users' hands as quickly as possible and incorporate the crowd's feedback to iterate. Your customers will provide the data you need to chart the best course for your company and bury any competitor that goes it alone.

I think then, when we started receiving the first of the user feedback, feedback from people that I had not specifically told about it, but had spread from friend to friend and then they were giving us feedback.

Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

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.

Generally, our approach with products at Google is to first develop the right user base and then to figure out what's the right experience for the ads.

In the early days, it was enough for Imgur to have a team that was focused on building product and engineering. But I realized early on if we were going to be successful, we needed someone who would be a bridge between the company and community.

Get a minimum viable product out there, test it out, see how customers respond.

It doesn't matter how good your product solution is if users don't enjoy or understand how to use it.

Run focus groups. Do whatever you need to do to get 8 to 10 people together in a room and put your product in front of them. Ask them how much they would pay for it and whether they would pay for it. It's really important to get user validation early and often.

Product development is emotional for me! It's really important as a brand that we feel that our products are going to be life-changing for everyone who buys them. We won't ever launch something we don't feel strongly about.

This is what customers pay us for - to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it.

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.

You should always look for opportunities to test innovations on a subset of users if you can.

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.

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

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

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

I think, with any new product that's difficult to understand, there are always lots of questions and criticism. I think we have all the right criticism. We're just going to keep executing on what we believe.

When talking to first-time entrepreneurs, I often ask them: 'How do you know that people want your product or service?' As you can expect, the answer is often that they don't yet, but will know once they launch. And they're right. That's why it's critical to launch as quickly as possible so you can get that feedback.

Here's the thing about Apple technology: once you own a piece, you want to use it.

It's the scale that Yahoo brings - and that user base - that I really want to build products for.

In many cases, the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.

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