by mrandish | 2025-10-31 20:18:41+00:00
I'm not comfortable with the word 'visionary' because it's ill-defined and unscoped. So I don't use that word because I don't think in those terms. This may be because most of my later career was spent leading teams conceiving and shipping cutting-edge tech products in new categories - sometimes launching those categories - occasionally with historically notable success, usually with middling success and sometimes with abject failure. After a couple decades this track-record resulted in several years leading innovation globally at a top ten valley tech giant.

So I've thought a lot about new tech product innovation including speaking, writing and teaching about it. When people have been kind enough to use 'visionary' in relation to a product I led, I thank them but reject the term and then try to turn it into a teachable moment about the thought processes, systems and relentless execution necessary to create results someone might someday describe as 'visionary'. I'm generally opposed to the trend in media and pop-biz-lit to deify outstanding new product development as somehow ineffably mystical. At best, it helps no one get better at doing this hard thing, and at worst, it's pulling up the ladder after we've climbed it.

The novel insights and intuitions which some people call 'visionary', in my experience, always seem to come after intensive research, deep study of prior work in the field and constant hands-on, practical experimentation. So I credit them as the indirect (but expected) result of the rigorous process of making and shipping cool new stuff. That said, I do think of Steve Jobs himself as one of the best natural tech product innovators I've ever met. Another example I cite as a significantly notable step change was SpaceX's understanding that the way to engineer exponentially more mass to orbit per dollar was pioneering a substantially different process of rocket development. That's more a process than a product - but that's kind of my whole meta-point.

If your question was basically to try to call out "guy who didn't think iPhone 1 was unusually visionary at the 2007 launch, doesn't think anything is visionary". Well... you win. But it's more because I think most new products in new categories are 'visionary' in some ways. It's just that the majority of new visions fail commercially. Semantically, 'visionary' probably best parses to a synonym for novelty and 'newly different' doesn't necessarily equate to good, so it's not useful as a threshold metric for product success. However, I do think the iPhone business overall is certainly one of the ten most innovative and successful new product businesses our industry has ever seen. But that doesn't change the fact that many knowledgeable observers at the original launch didn't see it that way - because it wasn't that yet. Twenty years of incredible success and constant iteration tends to obscure that the original product - as innovative as it was - wasn't what its descendants became. And the victors tend to rewrite history and our collective memories obscuring the context the 1.0 was created in. Standing there in the Apple booth, I DID think it was really good, bold and different. I told someone that night I expected it would probably be my personal "product of the year" - and recall this was in early January. My comment above was because just being a fanboy exclaiming how visionary a product is informs nothing and helps no one.