Bill Campbell on Steve Jobs, Market Research, and the Limits of Intuition

Bill Campbell reflects on his attempts to persuade Steve Jobs to embrace market research — with little success.

“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 disagreed:

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

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

While Steve Jobs’ intuition and vision were undeniably powerful, Bill Campbell reminds us that even the most groundbreaking innovations can be improved by listening to user feedback and market research, helping to refine the vision into something even greater.