Woz offers his golden rule for creating great tech products

Babson Insight has an interesting interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on what it takes to design and develop great high-tech products. The passage below is pure gold -- relevant to IT developers and anyone who strives to innovate. Can I convince you to hang it on your bulletin board?

Wozniak: I think design and development should always be done from a point of view that believes the human being is worth more than the technology. You just have to have it in your head that you will apply a lot of effort to bend your hardware and create your software design so that the user has a nice easy flow in using this product. In this way it fits their life as they live it now. The opposite way is where someone decides to put in all the functionality in a way that causes the user to modify the way they do things. This difference is where the huge value is, at least for Apple.

He was also asked about the role of luck in innovation.

Wozniak: My view on that is that markets can’t be predicted precisely. In my case, a lot of the time I worked at something I was very interested in working on and all of a sudden it became very valuable to the universe, such as the personal computer. It was just something I was going to be building that year in my life no matter what, and I’d been working toward that from the time I was 10 years old. So it just turns out to be that valuable. That’s what I was going to do. Sometimes, you could build a device that is so incredible, but it doesn’t solve a need for the masses, and you don’t get recognized. Some products hit it bigger than others. You know, there were a lot of people looking for the formula, too, for a personal computer. I guess ours just turned out to be the right one.

In my final excerpt, here's Woz on what characteristics he looks for in an innovative engineer:

Wozniak: I look for someone who will explain what they have done before in terms of why it was so much better than what others had done. They should sound like they can’t live without solving these problems. It’s just what’s inside them; it’s their passion. You can hear it in the words they use and the excitement in their voice. They have trouble falling asleep because their mind is still on the problem. And when they do sleep, they dream about solutions, sometimes waking with new ideas they have to rush off and try. I remember that happened to me with the Apple I and II and other early Apple products. I’d fall asleep and wake up with a better way to make something work.

----------
Related:
Who creates the best brands: Egotistical insaniacs or market researchers?