Nobody's Interested in the Kitchen
August 2014
Everyone loves delicious food, but few people are interested about what happens in the kitchen.
Think back to the last time you had a fantastic meal at a restaurant. Did you march into the kitchen, pull the chef aside, and demand, "What's your secret?"
What you actually did was exclaim how wonderful the food tasted to your date and then forgot about it.
This isn't a personal fault. This phenomenon is actually what makes the creative arts work. You can enjoy the experience without worrying about the design underneath. Ignorance is the main ingredient to magic.
Creative work takes an immense amount of taste to create, but a minimum amount of taste to enjoy.
Note that I don't mean "people without taste" as a pejorative. I mean it simply as someone who isn't focused on furthering the art in that particular field. Think: "George doesn't want to become a cook," matter-of-factly, instead of: "George is an idiot," as a character flaw.
Imagine you're an aspiring chef inventing a new dish and you invite your friend to try it.
The kitchen is messy. There's a pig's corpse in the corner splattered with blood. There's raw guts flowing everywhere. There's an terrible stench that gives you a headache. And then, you offer your friend a bite of your work-in-progress.
Your friend takes that bite and throws up. You become demoralized and become a waiter instead at the big chain down the street.
The trouble with getting feedback for creative work is that you should expect to be misunderstood.
For the dish above, your mind is envisioning the perfect candle-lit table with matched wine. You decided to demo the novel insight because that is what makes your product different.
When your friend throws up, you think the reason is because of your new trick when they actually throw up because they can't block out the smell of pig blood.
When your friend doesn't have taste, all they know is that the bite tasted terrible and they threw up afterwards.
Depending on how convincing your friend is, you can give up. In place of friend, you can substitute mentor, investor, or family.
Getting demoralized from early bad feedback is an antipattern.
The best people to give feedback are people with incredible taste in your field. People with taste will appreciate your novel insights and see past the incompleteness to see the underlying intent.
Incidentally, Y Combinator partners are exceptionally good at this. (YC Winter 2014 applications are open. http://ycombinator.com/apply/)
Pixar uses a structure known as a braintrust to delicately examine works-in-progress. The braintrust is composed of some of the best storytellers of our generation who take a supreme effort in understanding the director's intent before offering suggestions.
What's most incredible is that this feedback from the world-class cabal is merely suggestive and the director has the power to reject changes. The braintrust is aware of the danger of heavy-handed feedback squashing the soul of the product.
New ideas are delicate and brittle. What starts off as a ugly, tangential feature later grows up to become a fundamental part of the final product.
Seek out the people who have demonstrated refined taste in your product's field. Respect their recommendations but realize that they're suggestions, not requirements.
A feasibility-based product enables a previously impossible or very difficult action that users need to perform. Examples of this include most SaaS, PaaS, B2B products. Lean methodology works wonderfully because the bulk of the value is embedded within the ability to perform the action.
The quality of experience matters little as long as the action is fully and adequately performed. Taste isn't required as the result tends to be binary: does it do what I need it to do?
An experience-based product delivers emotion as the main value. Examples of this include most consumer products, such as Instagram and Snapchat. Lean methodology fails in this case because the space is filled to the brim with competitors offering varying degrees of the same emotion. As consumers use the best product that offers the most powerful version of that emotion, users never see your product.
It's not possible to launch with a basic camera app and iterate it into a market leader. It would be the equivalent of Disney releasing a poorly animated short of ice princesses and hoping one day it turns into Frozen.
If your startup is providing a feasibility-based product, the Lean Startup is the right way. If your startup is providing an experienced-based product, the Lean Startup is wrong.
You must be able to identify something that people want to feel. Once you've identified it, you try your best to use your medium to evoke it. What makes it hard is the fact that you can't ask people what they want.
It would be like Steven Spielberg showing up at your door and asking you what movie you want to see. Prospective users are surprisingly lacking in imagination when it comes to a blank canvas. When forced, they'll come up with a mashup of past hits.
This curious phenomenon happens because people remember past stimuli they've enjoyed and hope that the sum of these stimuli will yield something more powerful than the original. This is also why we see uninspired clones that look like Snapchat, Vine and Instagram mashed up together.
Asking people what they want is disappointing for both parties. As the director, you get uninspired, trite stories. For the audience, there's no magic.
Once you do have a V1, incremental suggestions become much more effective. You should then look for two types of feedback:
For the median entrepreneur, this essay reads like a recipe for disaster, wasting years of your life pursuing a hopeless project that ends up going nowhere. It arms their subconscious with the lethal weapons of self-delusion.
This essay isn't for them. This essay is for those at the top 1-2% caliber of taste who suffer from impostor syndrome.
It's for the artists who suffer from pangs of guilt when they're not releasing three weeks into a product. They hear the Lean Startup mantra touted by their peers and investors who call up to check whether or not they have launched yet.
If you have taste, it's ok to not launch immediately. A measure of slowness is a worthy price to pay to not destroy the larval insights that will make your product magical. When you do get feedback, keep in mind the reviewer's level of taste.
Everyone loves delicious food, but few people are interested about what happens in the kitchen.
Think back to the last time you had a fantastic meal at a restaurant. Did you march into the kitchen, pull the chef aside, and demand, "What's your secret?"
What you actually did was exclaim how wonderful the food tasted to your date and then forgot about it.
This isn't a personal fault. This phenomenon is actually what makes the creative arts work. You can enjoy the experience without worrying about the design underneath. Ignorance is the main ingredient to magic.
Creative work takes an immense amount of taste to create, but a minimum amount of taste to enjoy.
Getting Feedback
This causes problems when you present an incomplete product. When you ask someone without taste to evaluate it, you'll get misleading, or worse, demoralizing feedback.Note that I don't mean "people without taste" as a pejorative. I mean it simply as someone who isn't focused on furthering the art in that particular field. Think: "George doesn't want to become a cook," matter-of-factly, instead of: "George is an idiot," as a character flaw.
Imagine you're an aspiring chef inventing a new dish and you invite your friend to try it.
The kitchen is messy. There's a pig's corpse in the corner splattered with blood. There's raw guts flowing everywhere. There's an terrible stench that gives you a headache. And then, you offer your friend a bite of your work-in-progress.
Your friend takes that bite and throws up. You become demoralized and become a waiter instead at the big chain down the street.
The trouble with getting feedback for creative work is that you should expect to be misunderstood.
Why Don't They See?
This happens because your taste is also the mechanism that lets you extrapolate how great your product can be. When you present a demo, there's some kernel of insight that makes it unique. The assumption that is for everything else that is standardized to be executed flawlessly.For the dish above, your mind is envisioning the perfect candle-lit table with matched wine. You decided to demo the novel insight because that is what makes your product different.
When your friend throws up, you think the reason is because of your new trick when they actually throw up because they can't block out the smell of pig blood.
When your friend doesn't have taste, all they know is that the bite tasted terrible and they threw up afterwards.
Depending on how convincing your friend is, you can give up. In place of friend, you can substitute mentor, investor, or family.
Getting demoralized from early bad feedback is an antipattern.
So Should I Work in Isolation?
This doesn't mean you should ignore all feedback. You should weigh feedback by approximation of the author's level of taste.The best people to give feedback are people with incredible taste in your field. People with taste will appreciate your novel insights and see past the incompleteness to see the underlying intent.
Incidentally, Y Combinator partners are exceptionally good at this. (YC Winter 2014 applications are open. http://ycombinator.com/apply/)
Pixar uses a structure known as a braintrust to delicately examine works-in-progress. The braintrust is composed of some of the best storytellers of our generation who take a supreme effort in understanding the director's intent before offering suggestions.
What's most incredible is that this feedback from the world-class cabal is merely suggestive and the director has the power to reject changes. The braintrust is aware of the danger of heavy-handed feedback squashing the soul of the product.
New ideas are delicate and brittle. What starts off as a ugly, tangential feature later grows up to become a fundamental part of the final product.
Seek out the people who have demonstrated refined taste in your product's field. Respect their recommendations but realize that they're suggestions, not requirements.
Feasibility-Based vs. Experience-Based Products
Let's separate products into two main classes: feasibility and experience.A feasibility-based product enables a previously impossible or very difficult action that users need to perform. Examples of this include most SaaS, PaaS, B2B products. Lean methodology works wonderfully because the bulk of the value is embedded within the ability to perform the action.
The quality of experience matters little as long as the action is fully and adequately performed. Taste isn't required as the result tends to be binary: does it do what I need it to do?
An experience-based product delivers emotion as the main value. Examples of this include most consumer products, such as Instagram and Snapchat. Lean methodology fails in this case because the space is filled to the brim with competitors offering varying degrees of the same emotion. As consumers use the best product that offers the most powerful version of that emotion, users never see your product.
It's not possible to launch with a basic camera app and iterate it into a market leader. It would be the equivalent of Disney releasing a poorly animated short of ice princesses and hoping one day it turns into Frozen.
If your startup is providing a feasibility-based product, the Lean Startup is the right way. If your startup is providing an experienced-based product, the Lean Startup is wrong.
Building Experience-Based Products
If you'd like to build a great experience-based product and can't build iteratively, what should you do? Well, it takes a bit of genius.You must be able to identify something that people want to feel. Once you've identified it, you try your best to use your medium to evoke it. What makes it hard is the fact that you can't ask people what they want.
It would be like Steven Spielberg showing up at your door and asking you what movie you want to see. Prospective users are surprisingly lacking in imagination when it comes to a blank canvas. When forced, they'll come up with a mashup of past hits.
This curious phenomenon happens because people remember past stimuli they've enjoyed and hope that the sum of these stimuli will yield something more powerful than the original. This is also why we see uninspired clones that look like Snapchat, Vine and Instagram mashed up together.
Asking people what they want is disappointing for both parties. As the director, you get uninspired, trite stories. For the audience, there's no magic.
Once you do have a V1, incremental suggestions become much more effective. You should then look for two types of feedback:
- From people with taste. For these people, it will be talking about your unique insight. They can imagine a great product around that insight. The question is, is it compelling enough? For Finding Nemo, the unique insight was that it's rare to have such an open display of fatherly love for a son. When the Braintrust evaluated this idea, they assumed all other standard components (beautiful backdrop, animated background characters, great soundtrack) would be nailed and focused on the heart of the movie.
- From people without taste. These people will want a high fidelity bite that has been fully rendered. For Frozen, it would be the equivalent of creating a fully soundtracked, voice-acted, animated three minute short of one of the songs. It's much easier for people in your audience to taste a tiny nibble of something delicious and imagine more of it than to eat a slab of raw meat and imagine it cooked.
The Median Entrepreneur
The most important thing to realize is that this advice is terrible for the median entrepreneur.For the median entrepreneur, this essay reads like a recipe for disaster, wasting years of your life pursuing a hopeless project that ends up going nowhere. It arms their subconscious with the lethal weapons of self-delusion.
This essay isn't for them. This essay is for those at the top 1-2% caliber of taste who suffer from impostor syndrome.
It's for the artists who suffer from pangs of guilt when they're not releasing three weeks into a product. They hear the Lean Startup mantra touted by their peers and investors who call up to check whether or not they have launched yet.
If you have taste, it's ok to not launch immediately. A measure of slowness is a worthy price to pay to not destroy the larval insights that will make your product magical. When you do get feedback, keep in mind the reviewer's level of taste.
You may know me from: Steve Jobs reinvents the pen.
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