🚀 EVO17: Steve Jobs on Product Teams
Product Evolution is about helping Product professionals, Product teams, Product organizations and the products they develop to level up.
Steve Jobs made it clear during one of his interviews that Product development:
requires a tremendous amount of craftsmanship;
is based on products and ideas that evolve, change and grow;
is alive, as the team constantly discovers new problems and opportunities to fit things together;
is really a team effort;
is done better when a team working really hard on something they're passionate about polish each other and polish their ideas;
unlike most things in life, software product development has a huge dynamic range: the difference between the average and the best is 50 to 1;
accelerates towards success by getting enough A players to work together;
These ideas resonate with the principles of Product Evolution. After working with tens of teams, I believe that:
Great products are created by great Product teams, not by individuals;
Any Product team can level up, to become world class;
To level up a team, it's not sufficient to level up individual team members;
The investment to develop a team has a much better ROI than any individual investments.
Food for thought: What are you actively doing to level up your Product team?
Here some quotes from the interview with Steve Jobs:
About the craftsmanship of product development
“…the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work.
That if you just tell this other people "Here's this great idea", then of course they can go off and make it happen.
The problem with that is that there's this tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.
As you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts. Because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it.
And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make.
There are certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do, or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do.
And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain. These concepts. And fitting them together, continuing the push in fitting them together in new and different ways to get what you want.
And everyday you discover something new, that is a new problem, or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it's that process that is the magic.”
Beautiful stones metaphor for Product teams
“And so we had a lot of great ideas when we started, but what I've always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like when I was a young kid there was a widowed man that lived up the street.
One day he said: come into my garage, I want to show you something. And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler.
We went out in the back and got some rocks. Some regular old ugly rocks. We put them in the can, we turned the motor on and he said: come back tomorrow.
And I came back the next day and we opened the can and we took out these amazingly, beautiful, polished rocks.
The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.
And that's always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about.
It is through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise and working together, they polish each other and they polish the ideas.
And what comes out is these really beautiful stones.
So, it's hard to explain, and it's certainly not the result of one person.
People like symbols, and I'm the symbol of certain things, but it was really a team effort on the Mac.”
Dynamic Range in Software Products
“In my life, I've observed something very early on at Apple, which I didn't know how to explain it then. But I thought a lot about it since.
In most things in life, the dynamic range between average and the best is at most 2 to 1.
Like if you're in NYC and you get an average taxi cab driver versus the best taxi cab driver, you're probably going to get to your destination with the best taxi cab maybe 30% faster.
In an automobile, what is the difference between an average and the best? Maybe 20%.
The best CD player and the average CD player? I don't know, maybe 20%?
So 2 to 1 is a big dynamic range in most of life.
In software, and it used to be the case in hardware too, the difference between the average and the best is 50 to 1. Maybe 100 to 1.
Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life in is like this.”
Teams of A Players
“And so I've built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people. And not settling for B and C players. Really going for the A players.
And I found something. I found that when you get enough A players together. When you go through the incredible work to find 5 of these A players, they really like working with each other. Because they've never had the chance to do that before. And they don't want to work with B and C players. So it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players.
And so you build up these pockets of A players and it propagates. And that's what the Mac team was like. They were all A players. And these were extraordinarily talented people.”
Working Hard and Being Counted On
“I think that if you talk with a lot of people in the Mac team, they will tell you it was the hardest they've ever worked in their lives, some of them will tell you they've been the happiest they've ever been in their lives, but I think all of them will tell you that is certainly one of the most intense and cherished experiences they will ever have in their life.
Some of those things are not sustainable for some people.When you get really good people, they know they're really good and you don't have to baby people's ego so much. And what really matters is the work. And everybody knows that, it's all that matters, the work.
So people are counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. The most important thing I think you can do for somebody who is really good and who is really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn't good enough.
And to do it very clearly and to articulate why and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves no room for interpretation that the work they've done for this particular thing is not good enough to support the goal of the team.”
Source: Steve Jobs - The Lost Interview (35:40 - 44:42)
As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with better strategic thinking - which usually translates to:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.