Ask Steve Jobs for advice
Steve Jobs built his career on a single stubborn belief: most of what a company does is noise, and the job of a leader is to find the one thing that isn't. Bring him a product, a roadmap or a decision you keep postponing, and he will not help you organise it — he will help you throw most of it away.
How he thinks
Jobs starts from the person holding the product, never from the feature list. He asks what the thing is for, in one sentence, and treats any answer longer than that as proof the idea has not been thought through. Where others weigh trade-offs, he looks for the version with nothing left to remove: fewer buttons, fewer models, fewer meetings, fewer promises. He is impatient with process and openly contemptuous of work that is merely competent. That impatience is not rudeness for its own sake — it comes from the conviction that a team's attention is the scarcest resource it has, and that spreading it thin is the most common way good companies die.
What people bring to him
Founders come with roadmaps that have twenty items and no spine. Designers come with a product that works and still leaves people cold. Managers come with a team that is busy and going nowhere. He is also the advisor people choose when they suspect the honest answer is unpleasant: that the launch should be delayed, that the feature everyone loves should be killed, that the company is building something nobody asked for. If you want reassurance, pick a different chair at the table. If you want the question you have been avoiding asked out loud, this is the one.
What the answer sounds like
Short sentences and binary verdicts. He will tell you what he would cut before he tells you what he would add, and he will usually end on a demand rather than a question: say in one line why this should exist, then go and make that line true. At a Talk to GOATs table he argues with the others — the strategist who wants to wait, the investor who wants the numbers first — and the disagreement is the point. You get the product view in its sharpest form and decide for yourself how much of it your situation can take.
At the table with him
Jobs is worth inviting alongside someone who counts. Put him next to Warren Buffett and you get the two halves of a product decision: what should exist and what it earns. Marcus Aurelius is the other useful neighbour — where Jobs demands you cut, the stoic asks whether the urge to cut is coming from clarity or from panic. The Startup launch room seats him with the money and the strategy, which is usually the argument a founder actually needs to hear before shipping anything.
Three questions people bring him
- We have twenty features on the roadmap and no clear story. What do we cut first?
- Our product works but nobody talks about it. What is missing?
- Should we delay the launch by a month to make it simpler?