Leading Apple With Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius

Chapter 8

More on Product Strategy

Design Is How It Works

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

—Steve Jobs

Many people working under Steve in those early days didn’t fully recognize what they were seeing. I recently ran into Dennis Matthews, who had been Apple’s head of technical publishing years earlier. Referring to my first book, The Steve Jobs Way, he told me, “When I read your book, I got it. What hit me was that what we had been doing in those years [after Steve left] wasn’t about the product. We were no longer a product company. We were doing functionality of technology. We were looking at things like how to build better software without asking, ‘What will this mean to the user?’ ”