The standout there is Apple. Apple builds great products, doesn't do focus groups. They probably do multiple iterations but without large betas, the audience of those iterations is probably very limited.
Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so.
Most of all,Apple is the canonical example of the 'great man theory'. Apple has several of them - Jobs, Ive and several others whose names generally don't get publicity.
Now, this is not to say the original posts points aren't valid - most people don't have the talent or expertise that Apple do. But I just couldn't resist throwing in the obvious counter-example.
Doesn't do focus groups on products designed and designed again from the bottom to the top?
They even say so in their jobs faq:
Apple hires quality assurance engineers for internal product testing...We also create focus groups to provide feedback on our products.
When you have 10,000 employees (or however many they have now), it's very possible to do focus groups and usability testing completely internally. A startup with 3 guys, not nearly as easy.
Surely Apple must have shazillions af accountants, lawyers, logistics professionals, etc., that is people who are neither technology nor marketing experts.
You're probably correct. I doubt that even Jobs and Ive are superhuman enough to build the right product at the beginning. I do wonder how they do this with their culture of secrecy. Any focus group they run must be quite small or they must be splitting up their focus group tests.
For example, I remember reading a story about someone testing out the iPhone UI alone in a contraption in a box as opposed to the real hardware.
I heard a while back that they would intentionally use fake products for testing to see what group leaked the information. Kind of like having a watermark in the review copies of the movies given to the academy and sundance.
The downside of the "great man" setup is that Apple was not at all impressive without Steve Jobs at the helm. Uninspiring to outright bad Mac models, Microsoft putting out a superior OS for a time, etc. To be glib, with Jobs, you get the Wired "Evil Genius" cover story on Apple - and without Jobs, you get the old "Pray" cover story on Apple.
There is a difference between planning to fail and failure-tolerant.
People and companies still need to have long term vision of what to do "in case" your product is actually good, your startup actually gets funded, and of success in general. This turns you into a proactive player.
If all one does is have a system in place that reacts when something goes wrong, then this is really being reactive.
The unanswered questions at the end are interesting.
"This area of thinking started out with the hiring process, and the idea that maybe interviews don’t work at all – there’s a bunch of academic research that implies that, actually. So if how would you build a failure-tolerant system around the hiring process, if you assume that good interview candidates actually have no correlation to successful employees?"
I have been partial to contract to hire. You still have to do interviews, but you have a fallback position.
The problem with contract to hire is that it sounds great (atleast on paper), for the company but for the employee - most people interviewing take it to mean that the company wasn't super impressed with their interview and wants to test them out, and they could get kicked out at any time.
Think about interviewing for a job (not from an entrepreneurial mindset) - what you're looking for is the safety and security of a job and what the company is giving you is a contract position that can be terminated at any time without severance or notice.
It is a great idea but there is stigma (possibly unsubstantiated) associated with it.
There is a strong risk of losing out to anyone offering full time employment. In practice, the full time employment doesn't have much more of a guarantee with it.
This is especially true for computer programming and Business Analysts. The normal 3 month span will show you a minimum of competence, but it doesn't show anyone's final working level. The exceptional individuals will still stand out, but most companies don't have that kind of draw or the salaries to focus on them.
Where all these companies just put there for their names?
Article just doesn't make sense.
There is the talk by Jason from 37signals, where he specifically talks how he does not get this obsession with failing: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1798-jasons-talk-at-big-o...
Speaking of failure, my mantra on a personal entrepreneurial level has always been "build to fail" seriously. 0 risk = 0 reward. Don't have the guts to fail, and fail terribly... stick to a 9-5.
Be ruthless, and whatever you do, make sure it passes the deer-stuck-in-the-headlights-of-an-oncoming-car test. If it doesn't stir emotions to spread life, stick it out until you get that polished diamond in the ruff.
iPhone wasn't an overnight success, there's no such thing. Plan accordingly.
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And there's one thing missing from that comic strip. "I see... well laugh as you may. Eventually I'll be laughing all the way to the bank."
But these are three companies that are doing well enough that they can afford to take on failures. So something doesn't work at Google; the company's got enough revenue that they can absorb the failure without a huge problem. If you're running a small startup and it doesn't work, taking a hit is a lot more costly.
I think the author is confused with three different concepts: fault tolerant system, idea generation and agile development.
A system being fault tolerant, like googke, just means that it can rollforward/rollback when an error occurs. It is nothing more than a technical concept.
People in design industry often use brainstorming to generate and screen ideas. IDEO is just one of them. Brainstorming is not an explaination of either how they succeed or why they succeed.
And the framework Ruby on Rails characterizing convention over configuration and don't repeat yourself even has nothing to do with "failure-tolerance", thought it emphasizes fast iteration in development.
The over generalization in the article make its conclusion very unconvincing.
IDEO is actually very famous in the product design world. You've probably used more IDEO-designed products than you realize. They are a case study (literally) in creating a creative-productive work culture.
Unknown to you maybe - but IDEO is probably more well known than 37signals. They probably designed something within your reach right now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEO
Their releases are not cheap - once you announce a new iPhone, you cannot change the hardware before release so you really need to get it right. The soonest you can update it is a year or so.
Most of all,Apple is the canonical example of the 'great man theory'. Apple has several of them - Jobs, Ive and several others whose names generally don't get publicity.
Now, this is not to say the original posts points aren't valid - most people don't have the talent or expertise that Apple do. But I just couldn't resist throwing in the obvious counter-example.