Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:35:40 · Caitlin Kalinowski
A lot of people would start at the part they knew, like, "Oh, we're going to use this display, so I'm going to put this in CAD, and I'm going to do all this other stuff." But the architects who are the best actually look at where are the pinch points, where is this going to fail? And they start to do the detailed design there first. And then a couple other points is, the part that your customer touches or interacts with the most needs way more iteration than everything else. So easy on a computer, you touch the trackpad the most, and then maybe the keyboard next. So those things have to be really good. They have to feel good, they have to respond properly, they have to be highly reliable, and then maybe the other pieces further out don't take quite as much iteration. So you have to boost your iteration on the things that people touch the most or interact with the most. So those are kind of some principles that I wrote about, but these are just things that you learn trying to build quickly. And the last piece that's really critical if you're making hardware for folks out there who are trying to make hardware is, you can't wait around, ever. There's never enough time. So if you know that you need to do something, what I learned from folks like Shelly Goldberg at Apple now, who I think is a VP now, and Kate Bergeron when I was there at Apple is, you need to do it right now. Anything you know you need to do, you need to do right now, because in two days there's going to be a surprise coming around the corner that you need that time to fix. And so this sense of stacking the things that you know you need to do and just getting them out of the way, even if you technically have more time, is this kind of ruthless efficiency that I learned with them.
00:37:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:37:24] S1: Amazing. Okay. Let me just summarize your advice here. So one is be very clear on goals, I want to come back to this. Two is do the hardest part first, the riskiest piece, essentially, to physically build. Three is focus on the pieces that people will use most, say the trackpad, keyboard. I want to talk about that. And four is just like, do it now. Even if you think you have more time, you never know what's around the corner, and it's better- [00:37:51] S0: You just don't. It's not even that you don't know what's around the corner. If you're working in hardware, you actually don't have more time. [00:37:57] S1: Okay. On the goals, what are kind of like buckets of goals? So cost is when you shared like, "We need this under $300." What are some other buckets of types of goals people should be thinking about?
00:38:06 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:38:06] S0: So in VR display resolution or arc minutes, like how many pixels per degree do you want is actually one of the key metrics. So you need to understand what your key metrics are. And why is that key? Well, that's your visual field. So you think about Retina displays on MacBooks. They figured out the KPI of what the human eye could see, probably overshot it a little bit, and built that. And then do you really need to keep as much engineering pressure up on the resolution of a display after that? Maybe not. So VR's not there yet, not even close. Not in mass-produced VR, we don't have Retina displays yet. So that is one aspect of pushing that up is one example. I think on a computer, obviously you're talking about clock speed, you're talking about how many parallel processes you can run, you're talking about weight, you're talking about price, and you're talking about features. So when we did the MacBook Air, it became very clear, because we were machining it, that there are certain features, like ambient light sensor, that we just ... didn't make sense anymore. And so being willing to just jettison them for what we were going for, which was weight and size. So if you have those overarching goals, you can actually make decisions, engineering decisions pretty quickly. And this is actually something that I think Elon, I've heard, does very well, is define the value of a gram of weight versus the cost, or he does, I've heard, engineering ratios, essentially and he's able to put numbers on what those ratios should be, which I think is really smart.
00:39:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:39:47] S1: Interesting. So it's a very easy trade-off. "Okay, here's the formula telling us weight is less important in this case." [00:39:54] S0: Yeah. And if you can do that, then the decisions fall out pretty easily. [00:39:58] S1: Speaking of the Air and weight, I remember, I feel like there's a very classic moment in Steve Jobs lore where he comes out and has this manila envelope, and has the MacBook Air inside it, and then takes it out and everyone's like, "No way." Were you part of that? Was that something that people wanted to do from the beginning? [00:40:15] S0: I think, if my memory serves, the very, very, very first MacBook Air was a pretty low volume device that was machined, but kind of had more of a proof of what could be done. And that was the manila envelope one, I think, where the side door opened out to give you the port, and it had this shape underneath. And then the next rev of that was the MacBook Air that we know, essentially which is wedge shaped, which is different. And so the wedge shape is the one that I worked on, and the one that went and hit more volume. But that manila envelope one was the one that proved you can CNC a computer. And so they each have really important roles in the roadmap. [00:41:01] S1: Coming back to your point about focusing on things that people use the most, famously, Apple screwed up this keyboard. There was this butterfly keyboard situation for a long time. You're like, your eyes are closed [inaudible 00:41:16]. What happened? What happened, Caitlin?
00:41:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:41:01] S1: Coming back to your point about focusing on things that people use the most, famously, Apple screwed up this keyboard. There was this butterfly keyboard situation for a long time. You're like, your eyes are closed [inaudible 00:41:16]. What happened? What happened, Caitlin? [00:41:17] S0: I didn't work directly on that keyboard, so I can't talk about what happened with it, but obviously this is something that you got to get right. And I will say, the modern MacBook keyboards are awesome and excellent, and I don't know what happened with that. I don't think those were devices I was working on at the time. [00:41:38] S1: Nice. Safe. Marked safe. Along these lines, Apple's kind of famous for not listening to what people want. It's kind of like a classic thing with Steve Jobs. He's not walking around doing user focus groups, asking, doing user research, somehow continues to build incredibly popular products. What do you think they do right, or do they do a lot of user feedback sessions, things like that? How does it end up working out?
00:42:04 · Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:42:04] S0: I mean, I left over a decade ago, so I don't know what they're doing now in terms of user feedback. I think this one gets misinterpreted though, Lenny. I think that what is being said is if you want to build something new, customers don't know what they want, because they haven't seen it. So a good example is the iPhone, which I didn't work on, but when you build a new iPhone with a touchscreen, you can't really go ask a hundred people what they want, because they're going to say a keyboard on their screen. And this is, I think, the ethos that you're getting at, which is, and this is true for anybody building a new product with a new feature. And I've tried to build, as much as I can, teams that work on products that have something new about them. Either they're a new category, or there's a new manufacturing process, or something that hasn't been done before. And when you're thinking about this, you can't really use what you learned from the same field and the same product class. It just doesn't work, because you actually won't get the answer right. And I think this is actually what Steve was talking about, which is, you can't get intuition if you're changing something fundamentally. Your customers won't know what they want because they haven't seen it. But if you show it to them, they will absolutely know that it's awesome and that is what they want. But if you get stuck in an iterative feedback cycle with your customers, it's very hard to go zero to one with something new. And so in my view, and I don't know for sure, I didn't talk to him about this, but that's my view of what that means.