Steve Jobs The Lost Interview Notes

Marty Cagan visited Lenny Rachitsky 's podcast a few weeks ago and recommended a super insightful interview with Steve Jobs to watch.?It is available on Youtube or Amazon.

Most ideas from the interview, recorded in the middle of the 90s, are still reasonable.?There is no doubt that Steve was a genius. So my thoughts and findings on this interview are below.

Computer programming teaches how to think?

Indeed. While coding, we solve problems by writing scripts using elementary logic, compared to the complex thought process we have in everyday life.

Einstein once said that if you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself. And he was 100 percent right. It is easy to say "I want this" or "it should be blue." Yet it is tough to explain in plain English what "this" means or what "blue" looks like.

Moreover, Steve compared programmers with lawyers, which I found interesting. Studying at law school helped me to develop system thinking. Which is essential for solving complex problems in an environment with many dependencies.

One of the milestones in reaching the product-market fit: accepting the proposal to ship a more complicated product

Jobs and Wozniak reached it after they made a deal to ship assembled motherboards. Or whatever disassembled spare parts they were producing at that time, it doesn't matter. What matter is that if they hadn't closed that deal, they wouldn't build the infrastructure to make Apple I later.?

I've reached that milestone a few times in my career. For example, once the customer insisted on paying for the design if I shipped the working website. "No worries," I answered and hired the developer to code my mocks. As a result, I found myself running an early-stage design agency.

When sales and marketing leaders take over the business, they destroy the company's ability to innovate

It makes sense, even though that part of the interview was about the conflict between Steve Jobs and Apple CEO John Sculley. Sales and marketing shift priorities from building the right products to selling the products right.

For example, let's look at all FAANG corporations nowadays. Has everyone seen a ton of innovations past decade? Indeed.?

Launching an easy-to-use product is making the delivery longer and more complicated

Even nowadays, we are used to prioritizing functional requirements over non-functional ones. Unfortunately, usability falls into the second bucket for some reason.

As a result, we deliver software in scope and on time… with the crappiest user experience ever.

Why and What you do makes excellent products, not How you do it

That may perfectly correlate with Simon Simek's Golden Circle model, developed a few decades later. But it appears that Steve meant quite a different thing. It was a remark on how so-called process people work in large enterprises.

Companies try to replicate their initial success when they get bigger. It usually comes by institutionalizing the process which led to that success. I would say there is nothing bad with established and formalized processes.

Yet there are no people left in that equation. Their ambitions, hopes, fears, dreams, and chaotic creative environment led to that success. Not the process itself.

A shared understanding of a future product keeps everyone on the same page

Often leaders believe that hiring the right people will lead to success. That's a mistake. In the interview, Steve mentioned how tough it was to share his product vision. Even though he hired the best staff he could afford then, the team didn't buy it.

Sometime after firing Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley believed that the right idea was 90% of success. Even though this approach didn't work out, he filmed videos to share his vision.

I recommend watching the iconic Apple Navigator. It perfectly illustrates the vision of the experience users will have. I believe it is the best way to develop a culture of a shared understanding across teams and verticals.