Building the first iPhone's touchscreen keyboard was a make-it-or-break-it moment for the iPhone. Succeed, and the iPhone was possible. Fail, and the iPhone would've been shelved. This is its story.
It’s very difficult question to answer. How do you judge a leader? Is it financial success? The loyalty they engender? Their ability to inspire? There are war-time leaders and peace-time leaders. Leaders may be understated or zealous. I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to say definitively what constitutes a great leader. Regardless, we all want to improve our ability to lead, whether it’s a small team or a Fortune 500.
As a product, the original iPhone exemplified Apple’s holistic approach to hardware and software that are designed for each other, yet, at the engineering level, the iPhone hardware and software teams were almost completely siloed, with only Jobs and a mere handful of his most trusted (and talented) senior executives knowing the whole story.
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do think this is an important idea to call out, though, because a naive reading of product development methodologies is “ahh, I just have to follow this process slavishly, and I’ll be able to build a product that people want.” Which as anyone would know if they’ve ever put any of these product development methodologies to practice is simply not the case.
Learning All the Ways Product Validation Can Fail
I started my first startup at the end of my freshman year of university. It was an ebook publishing software company, and like most first startups, it was a disaster. We didn’t talk to users before launch, I fought excessively with my cofounders, I didn’t understand what it took to build working, usable software, or how to think about tech debt (a good thing, if used strategically!), or how to do user testing, or how to run proper product analytics. It was a great experience, though: I shored up most of those skill gaps in my remaining years at university. I read