Legendary coach Bill Campbell on trying to convince Steve Jobs to do market research at Apple

Bill Campbell was a mentor to some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey, and Sheryl Sandberg.

In the clip below he responds to an audience member who asks which approach to product he favors—the visionary Steve Jobs approach or the Lean Startup Methodology:

“I came from a real research organization like Kodak when I came to Apple in 1983. And I was always trying to push Steve [Jobs] into market research, and he would throw me out in the street most of the time. He always believed that he had enough good people inside his organization with taste that could tell him exactly what we needed.”

But Bill disagrees:

“I don’t think a marketing person would have created the Macintosh, but a good marketing person would have made it better.”

He believes a lot of the flaws in the early versions of the Macintosh could’ve been easily avoided with market research and user testing.

One of the things that the Lean Startup Methodology does really well, he argues, is let you rapidly iterate based on customer feedback. He says this is something he watched Google do really well when he was spending a lot of time there.

Full video: IntuitInc “Intuit CEO Conversations with Brad Smith and Bill Campbell” (Apr 2013)