Steve Jobs Speech and Design Philosophies for Startups

This is a favorite video of mine.  I still hold myself to this philosophy even after three years since I first saw Steve Jobs‘ commencement speech.  Even if you’ve seen this video before or heard the speech, watch it again.

When I worked at Apple several years ago, I’d see Steve walk into his design review meeting every Monday just a few doors down from my office.  As often as I saw him, I never got a chance to speak to him about his speech, but I always admired it.  The man is terrifying to his employees for the perfection he demands and the asshole he can be about his opinion. But you have to respect him for the ridiculously high standards he holds for the products Apple creates.  I’m sure there’s nicer, more respectful and polite ways of managing teams and inspiring to do their best, but I can also see how the absolute best is still beyond what most people consider “good enough” and  Steve consistently pushes things farther.  

What’s interesting at Apture is how we as a startup with only a few youthful engineers and one product designer can hold ourselves to the same bars of quality.  It’s one thing to have more than ten thousand employees, employ some of the best graphic and interaction designers in the world and pay them more than $100k salaries – but it’s another thing to take a tiny group of people of 4-5, pay yourselves light salaries, and accomplish comparably beautiful and functional products that exceed people’s expectations.  We also do this not only for our product’s success – but to help communicate Apture’s culture.  In our case, we hope to communicate how much we care about design.  

At Apture we’ve spent hours and hours replaying the animation functions we use, stressing out over the gradients in Apture’s windows, the colors we use in the product, and the multiple revisions of the interaction flow in the Media Hub.  It’s endless.  We probably spend too much time on this.  But we care about every pixel and every time slice.  It also costs us too.

As a startup, how do you balance your limited resources with your effort to inject your products with the same levels of detail users see in the most popular commercial products? Assuming your resources simply can’t compete of larger companies like Apple or IDEO, then you can’t possibly win.  Given the impossible tradeoffs of tight deadlines, how do you prioritize a pixel over a launch date?  Or a launch date over shaving off three seconds in your product’s responsiveness?  Obviously you have to quantify the value of the outcome of each decision, and then triage.. We have our own method, but I’d love to hear yours.