We Built for the Wrong Market and Accidentally Shipped the Heart of the Next Console Generation

Before automotive, before PlayStation, I was at AMD working on a project that would become the APU: CPU and graphics on one die.

The target market was clear from day one. Home theater PCs. Set-top boxes. Embedded PCs for televisions and advertising displays. That's where we spent our optimization cycles and our customer research.

We built reference platforms and took them to OEMs. The meetings all sounded the same. Looks great. But if you added one more thing. One more specialty feature. Then we'd talk.

So we added things. One of them was an audio processing system that was extraordinarily powerful for anything it was attached to.

Here's what I couldn't see at the time. The one-more-thing features were never what sold a set-top box platform. The real value was the underlying building blocks themselves.

We were aiming at set-top boxes. What we had actually assembled became core building blocks for the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

That market was never on our radar. Not once in all those OEM conversations did consoles come up as the destination. And it turned out to be far more successful than the market we were staring directly at.

The reframe I carry from that: focus is a strength until it becomes a filter. We were so locked on one target that we treated our best work as a side effect instead of reading what it was telling us.

Sometimes the market you didn't see is the one your work was actually for.

What's your team building right now that's quietly aimed at a market you're not looking at?