Iteration is Invisible

As we now know, the genius of Apple wasn’t Steve Jobs – it was and is the ability to continue innovating seemingly effortlessly. For two decades, they’ve made it look easy. Unfortunately, that makes innovating all the more difficult for the rest of us.

Every company that aspires to be customer-focused must reconcile the fact that innovation is in fact a messy process of ruthless iteration. It’s not that it isn’t messy at Apple, but rather that they do a good job of keeping the chaos hidden from the public. The notion that Steve Jobs just imagined fully-baked market-ready solutions is a fallacy that has led everyone from executives to entry-level employees to think they can do the same.

In reality, Apple does lots of market research. Their iterations are tedious but often invisible. Consider the following questions that aren’t well known or easily recalled by the public:

• How many concepts for the Airpods were discarded before they arrived at the first generation?
• How long did it take from initiating brainstorming to the launch of the first generation of the Airpods?
• How much market research did Apple do before moving forward with the first version of the Airpods?
• What are the differences between today’s Airpod Pros and the first generation Airpods?

Not only are the private iterations not well-publicized, but we’d each be hard-pressed to even recall the public iterations that have happened from the first generation product onward. Consider some side-by-side screens of popular apps from years back compared to today.

Disgusting right? It takes a lot of iterations, both private and public, to get a product to its current state. Few to no products are aspirational in their initially conceived state. The faster the iterations, the shorter the public’s memory of the past versions.

This is a good lesson for product and research teams everywhere. At Feedback Loop, we enable customers to make generating consumer feedback and iteration as straightforward and painless as possible. But it’s still a messy process! Most ideas are bad and need to be rejected. It’s the repeated elimination and inspiration that leads to innovation.

The key is to realize that just because the process doesn’t seem messy from an outsider perspective doesn’t mean it isn’t actually messy. And that’s a very good thing, not something to be avoided.

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