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Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common

andrewchenblog.com

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Re: Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common

#2

Post by sriramk »

The standout there is Apple. Apple builds great products, doesn't do focus groups. They probably do multiple iterations but without large betas, the audience of those iterations is probably very limited.

Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so.

Most of all,Apple is the canonical example of the 'great man theory'. Apple has several of them - Jobs, Ive and several others whose names generally don't get publicity.

Now, this is not to say the original posts points aren't valid - most people don't have the talent or expertise that Apple do. But I just couldn't resist throwing in the obvious counter-example.

Re: Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common

#3

Post by marcusbooster »

sriramk wrote: post #2

The standout there is Apple. Apple builds great products, doesn't do focus groups. They probably do multiple iterations but without large betas, the audience of those iterations is probably very limited. Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so. Most of all,Apple is the…

Doesn't do focus groups on products designed and designed again from the bottom to the top?

They even say so in their jobs faq: Apple hires quality assurance engineers for internal product testing...We also create focus groups to provide feedback on our products.

http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/pro/inside/questions.html

Re: Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common

#4

Post by russell »

The unanswered questions at the end are interesting.

"This area of thinking started out with the hiring process, and the idea that maybe interviews don’t work at all – there’s a bunch of academic research that implies that, actually. So if how would you build a failure-tolerant system around the hiring process, if you assume that good interview candidates actually have no correlation to successful employees?"

I have been partial to contract to hire. You still have to do interviews, but you have a fallback position.

Re: Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common

#5

Post by sriramk »

marcusbooster wrote: post #3
sriramk wrote: post #2

The standout there is Apple. Apple builds great products, doesn't do focus groups. They probably do multiple iterations but without large betas, the audience of those iterations is probably very limited. Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so. Most of all,Apple is the…

Doesn't do focus groups on products designed and designed again from the bottom to the top? They even say so in their jobs faq: Apple hires quality assurance engineers for internal product testing...We also create focus groups to provide feedback on our products. http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/pro/inside/questions.html

I'm going by Ive's interview plus off-hand comments I've heard from ex-Apple employees

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/07/01/a-fireside-c...

Re: Built to Fail: What Google, Ideo, and 37signals have in common

#10

Post by gchucky »

But these are three companies that are doing well enough that they can afford to take on failures. So something doesn't work at Google; the company's got enough revenue that they can absorb the failure without a huge problem. If you're running a small startup and it doesn't work, taking a hit is a lot more costly.
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