“You’ve Got To Start With The Customer Experience And Work Back..”

He was a devil to work with and he was right there in the details. No other chief executive of a corporation Apple’s size operated like Steve Jobs did. It was common, as news of his death sank in yesterday, to pay tribute to his visionary leadership. But it might not be this high-level guidance – spot on though it usually was – which Apple will find itself missing most. It is Mr Jobs, the details man, whose loss aches worst of all within his extraordinary company.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, not the other way around” he said, shortly after returning to the company in 1996 after his decade in exile, and set himself up as the gatekeeper of that customer experience.

 

Source: The Independent, Friday 7 October 2011