sids blog

People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. – Steve Jobs 

When Mike Markkula joined Apple in the early days, he shared three powerful ideas with Steve Jobs: Empathy, Focus and Impute. 

Empathy is understanding customers’ needs and desires. 

Focus is the ruthless prioritization of what’s important. 

Impute is the idea that first impressions matter.

Empathy 

Steve followed these rules religiously. Alan Kay famously said that Steve Jobs understood desire—that’s empathy. He never used focus groups, but he had a great sense of what users wanted. From Mac to Iphone, he created products people didn’t know they needed until they used them and couldn’t live without them. 

Henry Ford once said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Instead, he gave them cars. Jobs worked in the same way.

Focus 

When Steve returned to Apple in 1997, he streamlined all Apple products and reorganized the company to focus on a few important. Every year, he took top 100 employees on a retreat. Where he would ask them what 10 things they should be working on next. He’d write those on a whiteboard and then erase the last seven. The remaining three would become the company’s focus. That’s what focus is. That’s what ruthless prioritization looks like.

Impute 

If you’ve ever unboxed an Apple product, you know it feels like opening a gift. That’s intentional. Apple cares deeply about their packaging and presentation. Even the keynotes Steve delivered for product launches were designed to leave a lasting impression on the audience. 

Even though Mike Markkula taught Steve Jobs these principles, the root of Steve’s obsession with product design and development came from his Zen Buddhism practice. Zen Buddhism is all about simplicity and essence.

Steve believed that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. But simplicity is not easy; to simplify, you need to go deep into complexity. Steve said people are too busy to figure out how to use your product, so the user experience should be intuitive. That’s why he obsessed over end-to-end control—through hardware, software. 

Learning about these principles made me see Apple products differently. I’ve always loved using them for their ease and elegance, but now I’m even more curious about the minds that created them…

Perhaps the real lesson is this: great design isn’t about features – It’s about empathy, simplicity, and an obsessive attention to the invisible details that shape how we feel.