What Would Steve Jobs Do?
Ruthless focus, taste as a strategy, and the courage to kill a good idea for a great one.
Free for your first 3 questions. No account needed.
Steve Jobs built his reputation on subtraction. The Apple story most people remember is the launches, but the decisions underneath them were almost always about what got cut: product lines collapsed into four quadrants, buttons removed, features refused. If you bring him a plan with fourteen priorities, the interesting part of the answer is which twelve disappear.
He also treated taste as a business input rather than decoration. Typography, packaging, the feel of a hinge — these were treated as evidence of whether the team actually cared. That is a useful lens even when you are not making hardware: it turns vague questions like "is this good enough?" into concrete ones about detail and intent.
How Steve Jobs is known to think
Start from the experience, work back to the tech
The famous framing is deciding what the customer should feel first, then finding the engineering that delivers it — not shipping whatever the current stack makes easy.
Say no to 1,000 things
Focus is treated as an active, painful act of elimination. Expect the answer to name the one thing worth doing and dismiss the rest.
Simplicity after the work, not before it
Simple output is the result of understanding a problem deeply — not of skipping steps. A shortcut and a simplification look different.
Small teams of A-players
Headcount is a symptom, not a solution. Expect pushback on hiring your way out of a clarity problem.
Good situations to ask about
- →A product or feature list that has quietly doubled in size
- →A launch, deck or landing page that feels busy but not convincing
- →Deciding what to kill when everything looks important
Questions you can paste straight in
- “Here's our product roadmap for the next quarter — what would you cut?”
- “Nobody is using the feature we spent four months on. What now?”
- “Rewrite this homepage copy so it says one thing instead of six.”
Parody, not the real Steve Jobs
Answers on this site are AI-generated parody written in the style of a well-known public persona. They are not real statements, quotes, endorsements or professional advice from Steve Jobs, and we are not affiliated with them in any way. In this app they even go by Jeve Stobs. Read the full disclaimer.