Steve Jobs
Focus is what you say no to
The things you cut are the good ones
WWDC 1997 Q&A (on film); the 1997–98 product-line cuts
Everyone says they are focused. What makes his definition worth reading is that it points the opposite way from the instinct.
What actually happened?
Apple in 1997 had dozens of overlapping product lines and was close to insolvent. He drew a two-by-two on a whiteboard — consumer and pro, desktop and portable — one machine per square, everything else cancelled, including the Newton, which had years of work in it. At WWDC that year he said the part people leave out: people think focus means saying yes to the thing you have got to focus on; it means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. And then the harder sentence — that he was as proud of the things they had not done as of the things they had.
The test comes from good ideas, not bad ones
A bad idea does not require focus to refuse; it dies on its own. What dilutes a company is the hundred directions that are genuinely decent — each with a champion, a deck and a reason. The whole difficulty of focus is that every cut lands on something that was right.
The real work in a roadmap review is not killing the weak proposals. It is keeping one of five that all hold up. Keeping two is not a decision.
The number of squares is the discipline
The grid works because it is a physical constraint. There are four squares; for something new to enter, something has to leave. Without a container that hard, focus always loses to one more will not hurt — addition needs no argument, only subtraction does.
Put the current work in a table with a fixed number of rows on the wall. Any new proposal answers one question first: which row does it replace?
Give credit for what was not done
Organisations reward shipping, so everyone starts things and nobody stops them. As proud of what we have not done is a medal for subtraction — markets not entered, features not added. Those decisions are invisible, and unless they carry the same standing as a launch, no is something people say and never do.
Add a page to the annual review: what we turned down this year and what it saved. The day someone is willing to own that page is the day no becomes politically possible.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: the list of directions keeps growing and each one makes sense on its own.
Ask first: if only one could stay, which? And who will publicly own saying no to the rest?
Where it goes wrong: turning no into contempt for anything new. He killed the Newton and shipped the iPod two years later — the squares are there to be emptied, not sealed.
Lines to keep
As proud of what we have not done as of what we did.
Simple is harder than complex. You must get your thinking clean.
Same situation, other people are asking
Every option makes sense and I can't choose.They're all good ideas. That's exactly the problem.I'm climbing and it isn't the thing I wanted.What I want to do and what I should do are two different things.Too many paths · all 9 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.