Some people seem to have a really hard time accepting that there is more than one approach to creating a new product. Here are four options. 

1.
You can conduct extensive market research and follow an ultra rigorous methodology. Maybe your risk of failure goes down, but your risk of creating something that’s middle of the road probably goes up. 

People love this approach if they are primarily concerned with not failing rather than achieving greatness. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with this approach. 

2.
You can create something you really love and hope that other people share your enthusiasm. Your risk of failure goes up, but your risk of boredom and mediocrity goes down*. This is the Steve Jobs approach, according to his own words. 

People will tell you not to do this because you are not Steve Jobs, but neither was he until he was. They will also look at you condescendingly and say “You are not your customer.” Well…sometimes you are, actually. Yvon Chouinard was his own customer at first — he's done alright. 

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach either, if you’re aware of the risk profile. I wrote three books this way and it worked just fine even though I am not Steve Jobs or Yvon Chouinard. 

3.
You can cultivate great taste over a number of years and use your intuition to guide you towards a solution that transcends functionality and might become a cultural artifact. Your risk of success might be lower but should you succeed you’ll become a legend. 

You could call this the Newson / Rubin / Pharrel approach. People will tell you not to do this because they don’t have great taste themselves, and think Spock is the model par excellence for a business decision maker. Again, there is nothing wrong with taking this approach, if you’re aware of the risk profile. This is how I approached building my BMW motorcycle. I am as far from being a legend as I am from Marc Newson's birthplace, but it still worked. 

4.
You can run ten experiments and see which one gets traction. If nine fail and one succeeds beyond your wildest dreams nobody will give a shit about your failures. This is the probabilistic / portfolio approach that incubators, VCs etc. follow. 

People outside of this world will look at the 90% failure rate and condemn the players as stupid. But that’s because they don’t understand the connection between risk and reward. Again, there is nothing wrong with this approach, if you’re aware of the risk profile. 

I am hard at work on my next idea, and am already incorporating elements of all four. We’ll see how it goes. Rain your bile down upon me in the comments below. 

*Kudos to Ben Eyler for coining the term "Risk of mediocrity". I said I would steal it, and now I have.

See this post on LinkedIn