steve jobs I spend more time than I’m comfortable with on Twitter. but photos like this keep me hooked.

It is remarkable how Apple went from this hideous device being “This may be our answer” to the actual iPhone they shipped.

The people at Apple are not just smart, again, they called the device in the screenshot “This may be our answer”. So it must be their process that allows them to go from this photo to the actual iPhone they shipped

I remember a talk about Steve Jobs where he talked about how Apple iterates on products and I think that can be the answer here. I’m not sure but I can see it. It’s too abstract

Feedback time

A real sense of iterations can be linked to fast feedback times, the faster the creator can see his creation, the more iterations he/she can do before the creation reaches the “good enough” stage.

Designers can feel this better than programmers, but as a programmer, every time you face a bug during development and every time you test your code, you are iterating on your creation, you are getting closer to “good enough”.

I’m a programmer, so I can speak about feedback time better in that context. I was working most of my career as a mobile developer.

Typical iteration for me would be writing code, and then hitting run, a compiler takes the code I write, compiles it, and runs it on a simulator, I click on the simulator, test my app, then I go back to the code and repeat. Until I reach “good enough”

Now that used to be the case for most of my career, then declarative UI came along, and live previews now enable you to change the code and see the results of your code instantly, this almost 10x your iteration speed!

You can even see the changes you made in the simulator, cutting compiling time to zero.

Product Leverage

The shorter feedback cycle doesn’t only mean that you can reach “good enough” faster but do more iterations, thus achieving a better end result.

Warning: This applies to when you are the actual creator/executor, not just the executor. Or in a culture that promotes iterations.

The reason I bothered to write this is to actually share this talk below, I do not want to spoil it too much but in this talk, the speaker shows some demos showing how we can get feedback time for creators down to ZERO.

The talk is 12 years old, but the demos shown are way ahead of our time TODAY, it’s amazing that we do not have these tools yet.

I hope you enjoy the talk like I did: