by Jonathan A. Handler, MD, FACEP, FAMIA
I just listened to the audiobook, “Apple: The First 50 Years” by David Pogue. I thought it was excellent! The audiobook mentioned a story that was also reported elsewhere (such as this article): apparently, Steve Jobs spent 30 minutes deciding the shade of gray to be used for Apple Store bathroom signs. The article notes that he may have gone “a little too far” with this decision and that he zeroed in on “the most insignificant” details, although it does caveat “Of course, that’s why he’s Steve Jobs and we’re not.”
This is exactly the kind of “waste-of-time work” that managers often kill in order to get products out the door, on time and on budget. And it’s also a key reason why so many of the products we see are so “blah”. You don’t get “insanely great” products by making release decisions driven primarily by time and budget rather than product readiness and awesomeness. People frequently think “reasonable” and “realistic” managers are needed to control the excesses of brilliant creatives. I question how often this is actually true. Specifically, those who think this bathroom sign color decision was insignificant and a waste of time may not be considering two important concepts: resonance sensitivity and subconscious palpable synecdoche. What do I mean by these fancy terms? Read on and find out!
Resonance Sensitivity
Although I discussed resonance sensitivity at length in a previous post, I offer a short recap here, along with a new (to me at least) related hypothesis. Sometimes, great product managers may obsess about a detail that really is unimportant. But who decides what is important and what is insignificant? What’s important is not always obvious, and may even be counterintuitive. Great product makers are “resonance sensitive,” having an amazing ability to distinguish what really matters from what doesn’t. In my experience, great product managers are awesome and distinctly rare. More often, it seems product managers are “resonance insensitive,” frequently failing to identify what the customer will love. Worse, they typically think they are good at this, even as they produce blah products. Sometimes those products sell well, even though customers don’t love them. When resonance insensitives have the final say in “what’s important” for the product and overturn decisions made by resonance sensitives, blah products usually result. It’s virtually impossible to get rid of the “waste-of-time stuff” without also accidentally killing really important stuff that looks like waste-of-time stuff to resonance insensitives. “Common sense” differs from resonance sensitivity, and common sense often misleads decision-making about what’s important.
My “Insignificant Detail Hypothesis”
Not everyone who obsesses about seemingly insignificant details is a great product manager, but virtually everyone who is a great product manager obsesses about seemingly insignificant details.
One of the key characteristics of a great, resonance sensitive product manager is being right more often than not about which seemingly “insignificant details” are actually significant.
Subconscious “Palpable Synecdoche”
What the heck is “palpable synecdoche”?! “Synecdoche” is a term for a part of something being used to represent the whole thing, or a whole thing being used to represent a part of it. What the heck does that mean!?!? Perhaps some common examples will help:
- Part representing the whole: “We need more helping hands!” In this case, each pair of hands represents a whole person needed to help, not literally hands without the rest of the person attached.
- Whole refers to the part: “Chicago scored a touchdown in the Super Bowl.” “Chicago” refers to the Chicago Bears football team. The whole population of the city did not literally play in the Super Bowl game and score that touchdown.
An old Infiniti commercial illustrated this concept wonderfully (click the link and watch it!). In it, Jonathan Pryce talks at some length about the clock in the car, and all the thought that went into it. Then he says, “If they put that much thought into the clock, imagine the other thoughtful extremes they went to.” This is synecdoche — when a part stands for the whole. A well-designed clock doesn’t guarantee a well-designed car engine, but the commercial implies that it might. The clock is used to represent everything about the car.
My friend and mentor, Craig Feied, taught me the more specific concept of “palpable synecdoche” (I believe he invented this phrase). This car clock “synecdoche” may be called “palpable” because it’s something tangibly and directly experienced, rather than just a metaphorical figure of speech. I hear these all the time, usually in the negative. For example, “Since this restaurant’s carpet is dirty, I can only imagine what the rest of the place is like!” I hear people making these leaps frequently. So, something as trivial and seemingly insignificant as the clock in the car may be perceived as indicating the quality of the entire car. Although the J30 was reportedly a commercial disappointment, the Infiniti “Carline” that included the J30 still ranked #1 in the 1996 J.D. Power and Associates Customer Satisfaction Index Study SM. From what I read, it seems they got some things just right, but missed on some of the bigger ones needed to get more sales. Yet, the JD Power study may suggest that those who did buy were usually very happy. This post is not about product greatness measured by massive sales, but product greatness measured by customer happiness.
You might be thinking, “OK, a cool analog clock in the middle of the car’s dashboard is far more unique and noticeable than the shade of gray for a bathroom sign in a store!” You are right! And that gets us to the “subconscious” part.
Much of what drives a purchase may never surface to awareness. An expert has estimated that “95% of all cognition” (and “purchase decision-making”) is subconscious. Going further, research suggests that decision-making may begin before we are conscious of it. Going further still, it was shown that buying decisions appeared to be influenced by background music in the store, but most people denied that the music influenced their decisions when directly asked about it afterward. Many larger scale, repeatable findings continue to demonstrate that seemingly unrelated or tangential factors can affect decisions, for example, through anchoring. At least some studies’ findings suggest that people often seem unaware that their decisions have been affected (for example, here).
So, it seems likely that people often don’t know everything that influences their decisions, and those decisions may be influenced by subtle, subconscious factors. You think the shade of gray on the bathroom sign doesn’t influence your feelings about the Apple Store, but you might be wrong. Or, it might not influence your decisions, but it might influence someone else’s. Someone’s conscious or subconscious mind may be telling itself, “If they put this much thought into the color of the bathroom sign, imagine how well they designed their computers!”
I can imagine that the buyers of Apple’s products in the days of the first Apple Stores were more in tune than average with style, both consciously and subconsciously. Maybe only a tiny segment of the population will be influenced by a really nice shade of gray on a bathroom sign, but they may also represent an important buyer demographic for Apple.
Back of the napkin calculation: The first Apple Store opened in 2001. In 2001, Jobs reportedly had a net worth of $1.4B, rising to $1.6B in 2002. Of the $200M he made that year, presumably virtually all of it was from growth in Apple and Pixar, the companies he ran. Therefore, I use this as a measure of how his time might be valued that year. He was reportedly a workaholic, so if he was working 2500 hours a year (probably an underestimate), that equates to $80K/hour. Since it was reported he spent half an hour picking out the paint, that is $40K of his time. That year, the newly released Apple Titanium PowerBook G4 was $3499. For the fiscal year ending at the end of 2001, gross margins were about 31%, much of that reportedly driven by the Titanium G4’s sales. By the second anniversary of the first Apple Store’s opening, Apple’s retail stores had hosted about 15M visitors and had sold over $650M. If only 12 of those 15,000,000 visitors were swayed to buy the G4 Mac by the beauty of the store, including the beautiful gray paint color on the bathroom sign, then the revenues will have covered Jobs’ investment in time to select that paint color. If we have to cover that time through gross margin instead of revenues, then the number of G4 purchases needed to cover his time would be 37. It’s possible that the number actually influenced to make a purchase was much higher. Alternatively, you may say the number is zero, but how do you know? When it comes to what’s important for generating Apple product sales, given no other objective information, I’d argue the best-ever arbiter of that has been Jobs.
For anyone who’s not a billionaire, the time cost of that decision is far less expensive. For a product manager making $300K/year and working 2000 hours/year, the time cost of the decision is $150. It costs more to complain about the time “wasted” on that decision-making than it does to just let them do it. Yet, somehow, the complainers are labeled as the rational realists needed to bring the resonance sensitives down to earth so the business can stay afloat. I think otherwise: there’s nothing rational or realistic about being out of touch with what will resonate with the customer and impact their purchase decision-making.
Even if you are creating a product that will compete on price rather than quality, doing that just right, so that your product isn’t perceived as junk, still requires resonance sensitivity with the customer.
Worse, leaders often apply synecdoche to resonance sensitives: “If Joe wasted this much time on choosing the paint color for a bathroom sign, imagine how much of our valuable time he wasted on everything else! We need to get rid of him!” The resonance sensitives either learn to hold back or they push forward and end up labeled as money wasters, troublemakers, and out of touch with business realities. And that’s how companies often let their best people go and fall into decline. If Jobs hadn’t been CEO, I’ll bet he’d have been either fired or marginalized until he resigned on his own. Think I’m wrong? When he wasn’t yet CEO, that’s exactly what happened! I read that Apple’s leadership had lost trust in Jobs’ decision-making for its products, overturned his decision on Mac pricing, then marginalized him until he left.
Call to Action
What can be done to better recognize which “shades of gray” are meaningful for the product and the overall customer experience? This is not an easy answer, but here are a few things that helped me in my own journey. YMMV.
- Improve your resonance sensitivity regarding your customer or at least reduce your resonance INsensitivity. My earlier post on resonance sensitivity offers some suggestions for this.
- Study the science of bias and decision-making. I found the work of Amos Tversky and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman very informative, and well-documented in Michael Lewis’s book, “The Undoing Project“, and Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read one or both, consider asking your favorite LLM to give you a summary (bearing in mind the potential pitfalls of LLMs). For example, maybe a prompt like this:
Summarize the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Don’t make the summary too short so that it is overly general and not useful. Focus on the pitfalls people make in decision-making. Don’t provide any advice, since that often ends up as pablum. - Practice “Lateral Thinking”: If our decision-making typically feels logical to us, yet the evidence shows our decision-making is often imperfect and biased, then less-biased decision-making may, paradoxically, seem nonsensical (e.g., “let’s spend half an hour choosing the shade of gray for a bathroom sign”). We may reject those decisions incorrectly and out of hand. Pausing judgement to reflect on new ideas, even those that seem nonsensical, may improve our decision-making. Decades ago, I read Edward deBono’s book, “Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step,” and I felt it had some good techniques for this. Again, if you don’t have the time or inclination to read it, you might ask your friendly neighborhood LLM to give you a summary. For example, perhaps something like this prompt:
Please summarize the book “Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step” by Edward deBono. Don’t make it too short and general. I want the purpose, rationale, and specific techniques.
I would like to particularly note the concepts in the book of suspended judgement and the related concept of the word “PO” from that book. I don’t use “PO” in my interactions with others (because I don’t think anybody would know what I was talking about), but I frequently try to adopt it in my inner conversations with myself to keep myself from prematurely judging an idea or proposal.
Conclusion
Research undercuts common assumptions about consumer decision-making. People routinely decide “what details are worth it” when they lack the resonance sensitivity needed to make those decisions wisely. They often make those decisions without even the simplest estimates of cost or benefit. And that’s why so many fail to recognize the value of palpable and sometimes subconscious synecdoche, and instead bring more boringness to the world. You need resonance sensitivity to craft meaningful, palpable synecdoche into the consumer experience. Unfortunately, the more subtle the synecdoche, the more you will be doubted and even ridiculed for proposing it, and the more likely it is that a “more rational” leader will kill it. Even today, people often tell the gray paint story as an indication of excess rather than genius.
However, if more people become resonance sensitive, study the science of decision-making, and learn the techniques of lateral thinking to avoid prematurely discounting ideas, then more products may go from boring to brilliant.
All opinions expressed here are entirely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of their employers (if any), affiliates (if any), or anyone else. The author(s) reserve the right to change his/her/their minds at any time. Nothing here should be construed as medical advice.
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