I read with some interest this week the myriad of posts and more than 128 comments on 37Signals response to Dan Norman's Why is 37Signals So Arrogant? For those who missed it, check out Why we disagree with Dan Norman on 37Signals site. This all started with a Wired article on 37Signals founders Jason Fried and David Hansson The Brash Boys at 37Signals Will Tell You: Keep it Simple Stupid. In it Hansson is quoted saying "I'm not designing software for other people, I'm designing it for me."
Norman took issue that statement and 37Signals fired back. All fun stuff to read. The whole thing though misses the point for me. It felt like and old school/new school war where the old school preached the basic principle of listening to your customers and the new school scoffed and promoted the idea that real breakthroughs come from fresh thinking innovators.
In point of fact, both are needed because neither approach on its own is sufficient to producing what we call a Tuned In offering. Listening to your customers (or more importantly to the full marketplace of potential customers) is the only way to identify real, urgent and pervasive problems that buyers are willing to pay money to solve. If you're not doing that, nothing else really matters. But, taking them literally or only listening to their input tends to produce forgettable solutions as the input comes mostly in small, incremental enhancements to the current state. Worse yet, with a large base of input, the requests tend to diverge into a large number of one-offs that often conflict.
One of the biggest issues we decided to tackle in our research for the Tuned In book was the correlation of innovation to success and most importantly when it should be applied and how designers and developers should approach it. The evidence was pretty compelling. Relying on innovation as the central value proposition of a product or service created a culture that promoted 'inside-out' thinking. The propensity for the teams in these businesses to rely on their own smarts, intuition and finding ways to change the game promoted lots of guessing at what people really wanted ... a high risk approach that 9 times out of 10 led to a second tier offering that was 'complex' or an outright failure that crashed and burned right out of the gate becasue it was inpractical.
Innovation-centric leaders often cite Apple as a great example of a winning strategy based on creating unique breakthroughs. OK, let's look at it. Are the iPod and iPhone innovative? Sure. But, were they designed by individuals and teams that created design breakthroughs on their onw? Hardly. Both were meticulous about solving real problems that buyers had. In fact, although the iPod is a very elegant design, the real innovations were more practical -- iTunes and relationships with the music industry to distribute their songs -- components of the experience that made the whole process of making a customized library of music available on a mobile device simple.
The process of how innovation is created is a myth. Real innovation success comes from smart problem solving. Norman and 37Signals are having an interesting argument about design strategies but we think they'd both be better served by focusing on how to align to the process of getting Tuned In.
