As a product guy, I’ve always admired Steve Jobs. But I struggled to understand why didn't he use customer research.

In this thread I share why a customer-centric product legend skipped conventional research & what he did instead (spoiler alert: he sometimes hid in bushes)

1/Jobs believed traditional customer research gave you the wrong information

“The problem with market research is that it can show you what your customers think of something... but very rarely can your customers predict something that they don’t even quite know they want yet.”

2/ Jobs wanted a deeper level of insight

He was ahead of his time for spotting the limits of the old-school approach to customer research. You can’t ask someone how you can blow their mind, after all. If they could tell you, it wouldn’t be all that mind-blowing.

3/ To most people, the obvious strategy would be to talk to your customers—to live and breathe their feedback and input.

But Jobs isn’t most people. So, he did two things instead:

4/ First, he eavesdropped on his customers

According to lore, Jobs lurked around the Apple store in Palo Alto, peering in windows and squatting in the bushes.

It reveals a lot about the type of information Jobs wanted (and why traditional research fell short).

5/ Second, he doubled down on his intuition

By all accounts, Jobs had a once-in-a-million superpower. He could read his customers’ minds. His designs were powered by this intuition (and a simple set of design pillars).

6/ Relying on intuition—even intuition as strong as Jobs’—led to some shaky product releases.

His core design vision was usually spot on (even when he missed the mark). But sometime, the execution of a few of his products turned customers off.

7/ I broke down Job’s unique approach to understanding his customer in the article below. There are a few nuggets inside that PMs can use to replicate Jobs’ process, even without his superpowers.

Check it out https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-jobs-didnt-trust-conventional-customer-research-ryan-glasgow