Introducing the Counter-Fundamentals of Product Management
What Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk can teach us about the counter-fundamentals of product management
A basic tenet of product management is understanding user needs and then adapting to solve the pains the customer is going through. This is often through market research and customer interviews.
Sometimes, however, I would argue that this fundamental rule is not necessarily the right approach.
Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are the epitome of this “counter-fundamental”.
Henry Ford
The Model T was released on October 1, 1908. After the initial success of the newly released affordable car, he is credited (wrongly or rightly, we’ll never know) with the following quote:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Often a user is unable to see beyond their own myopic view of the world, relating to issues they currently face. They are unable to think “out of the box”, believing that the only solution is something in their own realm of thought.
By introducing the Model T, and at an affordable price, Henry Ford solved a significant problem facing people of the day. This is even more incredible when considering that people were only aware of their pain of “slow horses”. He solved a problem they didn’t fully understand that they had.
It is unlikely that anyone, in any focus group, would have thought beyond this simple pain. They would not have replied with something like “we want something to take us from A to B without the reliance on an animal that is slow and requires constant care”.
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is another example of this “counter-fundamental”. He is famous for saying:
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
Again, history will reflect that Steve Jobs literally revolutionised several industries whether it’s the phone market, music market (with iTunes and Apple Music) or Movie Industry (Pixar).
Steve Jobs spent an inordinate amount of time understanding customer needs without choosing to rely on market research.
Just a few months after the iPhone launch, a Forbes Magazine cover read- “One Billion Customers — Can Anyone Catch the Cell Phone King?”
The question in Steve Jobs mind wasn’t whether he could catch them. He wasn’t playing the same game. He was going to beat them in a new environment. He would take it to a new level, with everyone else sleeping on the job.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk runs two huge organisations, Tesla and SpaceX. I would argue that both of these have tackled problems we didn’t know existed, a-la Henry Ford.
First, Tesla was formed in 2007 long before climate change was a worldwide concern. Sure, people were arguing that it had to be tackled, but it wasn’t a worldwide movement as we see today.
Still, Elon Musk and his team (Elon was actually not the first employee) decided to tackle this head-on. They knew that people had failed before them in the pursuit of a practical electric car, but this didn’t stop them. Market research probably wouldn’t have put electric vehicles at the top of most peoples’ radar.
With regards to SpaceX, I would surmise that the stated goals of SpaceX are once again, not top of mind.
Elon Musk claimed that he wanted to make space travel more accessible. He also wanted to reduce costs by a factor of 10. Concerning the first claim, I believe we are still waiting for the realisation of this. For the latter, we have already seen the incredible strides taken, not only for the initial expense of a rocket but Musk also didn’t just stop at launching a rocket more affordably, but also landed it back safely for reuse!
Again, I believe that if he had done market research, I am highly doubtful that he would have come to these solutions. It is unlikely that he would have received feedback that the democratisation of space travel was high on anyone’s list of priorities.
What does this mean for the fundamentals, though?
I think that for us mere mortals, market research is here to stay. While we can try to innovate, we must be cognizant that only a select few can do so the way that Ford, Jobs and Musk did.
Of course, wherever I have worked, we have tried to follow the “blue ocean” strategy. Often though, I have seen us trapped in a cycle of “feature focus”. This “feature focus” is where we are so enamoured with the feature that we forget the pain we are solving.
In the end, a mix of the two is perhaps most logical — a bit of science and art, a combination of the fundamentals, with the non-fundamentals.
As always, if you enjoyed what you read, feel free to subscribe here.
