Steve Jobs

An entrepreneur and product leader whose work offers examples of focus, cross-disciplinary influence, and design. Follow those choices alongside the collaborators and earlier work behind them.

Make a priority change the work

In a September 1997 address to Apple employees, Jobs described removing much of the product roadmap so the company could concentrate its effort. This was a decision about what would receive time, people, and attention.

Our interpretation: Opportunity Cost makes the tradeoff explicit. What is the best alternative use of the resources a project consumes? Reconstraint adds a practical question: what must remain protected as you narrow the work?

Carry an idea across fields

In his 2005 Stanford address, Jobs recalled that studying calligraphy at Reed influenced his priorities for Macintosh typography. The story connects an experience in one field with a later design concern.

Susan Kare’s account supplies another part of the picture: designing the screen fonts. Follow the typography page to see how leadership, visual craft, software, and printing contributed to the result.

Begin with what a person wants to do

Apple’s 2007 iPhone announcement described actions such as tapping a contact to call and selecting a voicemail from a list. The product brought touch interaction together with phone, music, and internet functions.

The useful question for a new project is concrete: what should someone be able to do, and which combination of capabilities makes that possible? The iPhone page follows that question while preserving the longer history of multi-touch research.

Read the record with other voices

An August 1997 exchange with Avadis Tevanian preserves both a colleague’s reluctance to challenge Jobs and Jobs’s request that he continue. It gives the reader a more complicated example than an isolated quotation about conviction.

Keep objections and collaborators in view when studying a celebrated decision. A person’s explanation can illuminate their reasoning without establishing how often it worked or whether it will transfer to your situation.