Product Vision Quotes

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.

We don't want to be a design line. Ultimately, we want to be a platform that houses many design aesthetics.

I didn't appreciate, coming out of corporate America... what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world.

The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.

The boards had to be beautiful in Steve [Jobs]'s eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box, because he didn't want people tampering with anything.

Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

No amount of data will tell you if a feature should be in the product, because it doesn't exist. You need to have a very clear leader with a clear point of view... otherwise, you get a mishmash of features and stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Travis Kalanick was and is the perfect person to lead Uber, a product I knew from day one was going to be big.

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.

You need to set near-term milestones. Put the assumptions down on paper, and make it to your vision or ultimate product. Your team has to understand where they're going. Your partners need to understand where they're going.

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

Focus on your product. A lot of people focus on the name of their brand or the legal aspects, but it's more important to create your product. It's why people join. It's your vision. Without your product, nothing is going to happen.

Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product.

It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.

What separates us from other camera companies is that the vision guy is the decision maker. That was one of my biggest advantages at Oakley, and it's the same at Red - I'm in the trenches, in the product development, and I make the final call.

The kind of products you envision as an entrepreneur is a function of your life experience.

Initial feedback we got from people was that Poker could and should be a product in its own right. For us, that was definitely a case of us not seeing the forest for the trees since we are Poker nuts.