In 1979, Sony shipped a cassette player with no record button.

Every piece of market research said it wouldn't sell.

Every retailer agreed.

Sony’s own engineers begged their CEO to keep the button, because it cost almost nothing to leave in.

He removed it anyway.

That product went on to sell 400 million units.

I can’t stop thinking about this story.

Trusting the data vs. gut feel.

Sometimes less is more.

Let's get into it.

— Tom

The Jira team got tired of the same drill. A test fails for the third time this week. Someone digs in, reproduces the issue, determines the problem, and patches it. Two hours gone.

So they tried something Jira now supports natively. They codified the flaky-test playbook as an agent skill, assigned the tickets to a Jira agent, and let it handle the repetitive tasks like investigation, diagnosis, and open PR. The Engineer signs off.

Result: What took hours now takes minutes. In other words, we reclaimed enough time savings to equal a full engineering week back every month.

This is Jira.

Every team has it. The report nobody wrote. The vendor email stuck in drafts. The code review that waited a week. You can't hire fast enough to clear it, so the pile just grows.

There's a new way to handle it: an AI employee that works inside Slack and Teams and picks up the work no one got to. Meet Viktor.

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

The first working prototype for the Sony Walkman was a portable cassette player, built on the chassis of their existing Pressman dictation recorder.

The Walkman Prototype could play tapes, but it could also record them, because the recording component was already in the Pressman.

Ripping it out would actually have been more work than leaving it in…

But Sony founder Akio Morita told the engineers to rip it out anyway.

They pushed back:

Recording was the feature customers said they wanted. Sony had run the research.

Retailers claimed nobody would buy a tape device that didn't record. The engineering team agreed. Morita couldn’t care less.

He launched the Walkman at ¥33,000 (about $150 USD) on 1 July 1979, with a 30,000-unit run and an ice-cold promise to the board:

"If we haven't sold 100,000 Walkmans from now to the end of the year, I will resign from my position as President of the company."

The first month was rough. Sony moved only 3,000 units. Tracking towards 36,000 for the year.

Then word of mouth hit.

→ The next two months sold the entire 30,000-unit run.

→ By Christmas, Japan alone had bought 50,000.

→ US sales grew 41.3% in the first twelve months after the American launch.

→ The cassette Walkman sold 200 million units before Sony retired it in 2010.

→ Across all formats - cassette, CD, MiniDisc, MP3 - cumulative Walkman sales hit roughly 400 million.

The feature everyone asked for was the feature that would have killed it. Let’s understand why.

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

We all know the expression “less is more”, but it takes real courage to spend time and money on removing features.

The Pressman chassis already recorded. Leaving the record button in would have cost Sony nothing in engineering hours and saved them a redesign.

The "lazy" (even “rational”) path was to ship the prototype as-is and let the market decide.

Morita chose the hard path: rip out a working feature, redesign the case around its absence, and ship something narrower.

The deletion did four things at once:

Steve Jobs ran the same play in 2007.

The iPhone shipped without a physical keyboard, against every piece of evidence that BlackBerry users would never switch. Deletion was the product. A keyboard would have made the iPhone a worse BlackBerry.

Every builder knows that addition is intuitive. Every PM, every roadmap, every "what's next" conversation pulls toward more … but subtraction?

That takes conviction, because the case for keeping the feature is always concrete and the case for deleting it is always speculative.

You can always find the customer who asked for record, then bought.

But you can't find the customer who wouldn't have bought a heavier, more expensive, more confusing Walkman, but would buy the alternative, because that customer doesn’t exist yet.

Sony's market research wasn't wrong, but it was answering a different question than Morita was solving for.

When you ask a 1979 consumer about a portable cassette player, they answer using the only reference point they have: existing cassette players, which all recorded.

So their answer is "yes but make sure it records". They're not lying. They're describing the only product they can imagine, which is a variation of the product that already exists.

Said another way.

Said another way

This pattern appears everywhere.

Loom, AirBnb, and Spotify would never survive a 2001 focus group.

→"Do you want to record a 90-second video instead of writing a few sentences?"

→"Do you want to stay on a stranger’s sofa bed instead of a hotel?”

→ "Do you want to pay a monthly fee to rent, not own, digital music files, with no physical CD/record to add to your shelf”

The data would have said ‘no’ because the category didn't exist for the data to describe.

The rule isn't "ignore data". The rule is "is this data relevant to the new category I’m trying to build?".

The TPS-L2 had 2 headphone jacks so 2 people could listen together.

Makes sense.

It also had a button labelled "Hotline" that activated a built-in microphone.

Press Hotline, the music paused, and you could talk to your listening partner without taking your headphones off.

Innovative right?

Nope. It was pointless, since they could just take off their headphones, so Sony quietly killed them in the next model.

They also learned from the first batch that people wanted to listen alone, not together. The behaviour the Walkman actually created was solitary - the personal soundtrack, the bubble, the world tuned out. So they removed the 2nd headphone jack too.

Morita's team was last focussed on what people would do with the product, not what features the product should have.

Their guess about the behaviour was wrong. The discipline of guessing about the behaviour, then adapting based on reality, was right.

Most product teams reason at the feature level by writing spec docs, benchmark competitors, list capabilities.

But when you're inventing a category, you're not really shipping features. You're actually shipping a verb.

The Walkman shipped walking around with music.

If you're staring at a roadmap right now → ask yourself: what verb am I shipping?

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

Morita's own account of the Walkman decision, the founding of Sony, and his philosophy on why market research kills new categories.

The chapter on ‘inventing demand’ should be required reading for every founder.

Yup. That monkey meme was a 1988 Walkman ad.

A 10-year-old performing macaque refused to cooperate for two days. On day 3, during an unscripted break, he sat down, closed his eyes, and the camera was already running.

That accidental shot became the ad.

Iconic.

Ben and David spend 4 hours on the company that invented portable music, the CD, the PlayStation, and the format wars.

💡Any ideas for future breakdowns? PLG mechanics, viral loops, GTM tactics. Reply to this email and send ‘em in!

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