After I read Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, I wanted to write about Jobs as the ultimate product manager. 
Then I Googled it and found out a few others already felt exactly the same way!
Many people have written about the top leadership lessons of Steve Jobs. None better than the book’s author himself in the recent Harvard Business Review article. Rather than general leadership lessons, I’ve chosen to focus on the top product management lessons that can be learned from Steve Jobs.
If you have read the book, then perhaps like me, for the first half of the biography your overriding feeling was what a jerk Jobs was for most of his life. But once you either get past that or accept it, there is so much to learn, from someone who is truly a business and product genius. There is an art and science to product management and Steve Jobs understands both. I believe his product management success may boil down to three key lessons.
1) Sell internally.
One of the top skills of a successful product manager is to be able to sell internally. This is not the same as Inside Sales, which is another thing altogether. Selling internally means convincing others that what you want to happen is the right thing to do. An important point about this is it doesn’t have to be your idea necessarily. The phrase “success has many fathers” is true when it comes to product management. Many times, the best way to get your idea accomplished is to rally others to own the idea with you. You are in this together after all.
Selling internally requires you to be passionate about what you want. Colleagues will naturally gravitate to people that are passionate about what they believe in. Passion is a powerful tool for a product manager. It doesn’t mean you have to be angry, shout, or use expletives (in fact, it’s best not to). Passion means you should have conviction in what you do, broad and deep knowledge of the subject, and back up your claims with evidence about why something is important to do. As a product manager, your big rallying cry is usually to build a product to enter a new market, or create a new market.
Steve Jobs exemplified this passion and internal selling ability throughout his career. One of his earliest and most historic victories was the development of the Macintosh. Jobs accomplished this by creating a culture where it was perceived that all the cool kids were working on the Macintosh project. He was competing for internal resources with teams working on the Lisa (which ended up launching before the Mac but was not successful), and Jobs was able to internally recruit A-players to work on the Macintosh. The Mac of course famously launched in 1984 to great success. The inside of the enclosure for the Macintosh, which no customer would normally ever see, was signed in the molded plastic by every one of the original members of the engineering team. Steve Jobs was proud of the product, and wanted the engineers to be just as proud.
Side note: Back in the eighties, one of my first jobs during college was working at a computer repair shop in Austin, where from time to time we repaired the original Mac computers. (There was always one electrolytic capacitor that overloaded and used to blow up, and as a result the computer screen would not work but the rest of the computer was fine.) To get inside the Mac we had to take off the enclosure using a special screwdriver that I now know after reading the book why it was designed to keep people like me out. When removing the enclosure, I noticed all the signatures, including Steve Jobs, and wondered at the time what the heck they were thinking. Now I know – proud workmanship.
2) Challenge everything.
Throughout Steve Jobs’ life and career, it is clear that he challenged everything and everybody. Every market 
assumption, status-quo method, tradition, engineering timeline… you name it. His famous “reality distortion field” allowed him to conquer the impossible. His challenge to Steve Wozniak early on at Atari started it all – to design the game Breakout in four days when Wozniak said it couldn’t be done, and then he did it anyway.
One of the anecdotes I found the most charming was the story of how Jobs started his relationship with the CEO of Corning Glass, Wendell Weeks. Jobs called the main switchboard of Corning and asked to speak to Weeks, and Jobs was miffed when they wouldn’t put him through. When Weeks found out, he did the same thing – called Apple’s main switchboard and asked to speak to Jobs, and of course they didn’t put him through to Jobs either.
Jobs liked this and invited Weeks to Cupertino. Jobs described what type of glass Apple wanted for the iPhone, and Weeks told Jobs that Corning had long ago developed a product called “Gorilla Glass” but there was no commercial use for it. Jobs didn’t think it would be good enough, and had the gall to start explaining to Weeks how glass was made. Weeks was amused and told Jobs to take a seat while he taught him a lesson about glass.
First of all, I like how this shows that Steve Jobs was willing to challenge an idea about a market and product he knew comparatively little about. Secondly, I like that he then sat back, and learned, and accepted Weeks’ explanation about how strong Gorilla Glass was. He was so accepting, that using the power of his reality distortion field, he told Weeks that Corning needed to build enough Gorilla Glass for Apple within six months, and even though Weeks said this was impossible, in the end, it was done.
One of the biggest obstacles for a product manager that must be challenged is status quo. If you ask your colleagues why the company does something a certain way, the answer may be “because that’s the way it’s done.” It is hard to go against tradition, even when people don’t know why that tradition started in the first place. Or perhaps the market dynamics have changed and people don’t see it.
It is your duty as a good product manager to not be complacent. Don’t accept things because “that’s just the way it is”. Break the mold. Challenge people’s thinking. Just do it with a lot of credibility and knowledge and intuition and in a nice way. Otherwise it can be a Career Limiting Move. But if you do it right, and pull it off, you will be a rock star.
3) Keep it simple.
If you can’t describe your product vision with big animal pictures, without getting into details, your vision is probably
too complex. When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, there were a myriad of products in development and the company was in decline. After listening to his top execs describe for days all that the company was working on, Jobs had enough and got up in front of the whiteboard to draw a four quadrant square, with one targeted product in each quadrant. He said these four products were the only things the company could afford to work on, and literally every other project should be cancelled.
Product ideas should be simple, and the product functionality at a high level should be simple to describe. The product itself and how the product does what it does can be quite complex. That is ok, and expected. You have to build competitive advantage after all, and if it is too simple then anyone can catch up to you.
But product design and general functionality should be elegantly simple. And in Jobs’ mind, this included the packaging. I had an ‘a ha’ moment when I read that he was so particular about the details that he personally had a lot of input into the design of the product packaging. As a product person, that makes me smile and I can respect it. It says his attention to detail knew no bounds. And I have to say I do appreciate my iPhone’s packaging.
One of the great lessons from Steve Jobs is that the customer doesn’t even need to have a problem to be solved. This was very true of the iPhone. There weren’t any customers asking for a combination music player, phone, song downloader, GPS, touch screen device. Literally Apple built it and we all wonder how we existed without it. For consumer products, there isn’t a problem that necessarily needs to be solved. Sometimes it can be just an insanely great, simple idea that no one has thought of yet.
And More…
There are actually more lessons than just those three – sell internally, challenge everything, and keep it simple – that a product manager can learn from Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson includes a multitude of intriguing stories to help describe how Jobs worked and accomplished his goals. I strongly encourage all product managers to read the book – it’s practically a text book of how to get stuff done. Steve Jobs was the CEO but clearly a product manager at heart – the ultimate PM.
{ 0 comments }
