Remembering What Steve Jobs Said About Making Great Products

It’s been over seven years since the untimely death of Apple Inc. co-founder, chairman, and CEO Steve Jobs. Recognized as a pioneer of product development in the digital age, Jobs was as much a visionary as he was a difficult man to work for, demanding a standard of perfection among his employees which earned him a reputation for being notoriously wrathful and cruel when things didn’t go his way. Yet despite several personal shortcomings bordering on the unforgivable, there is no disputing the fact that Jobs understood the relationship between products and the people that use them in a way few if anyone else will ever match.

With this in mind, we felt it was worth talking about an important point Jobs made in the mid-1990s. This was a period of time after his original tenure at Apple and before his return to the company. When being asked during an interview about the development of great products, Jobs drew a line in the sand:

“When the people that can make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, they end up running the companies. Then the product people get driven out of decision-making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products.”

While it’s worth noting that Jobs had been thrown out of Apple after a former president of Pepsi-Cola was brought in as CEO, and no doubt harbored deep resentment about the incident, his observation withstands his personal bias. Companies that depend on sales and marketing as the driving force instead of product development are ticking time bombs of failure. It’s no surprise Apple eventually begged Jobs to come back, given his innate willingness to prioritize product over appearances.

The Road to Great Products

With so much of modern industry wrapped up in the wants and needs of sales and marketing, can a company successfully function with product development in the driver seat? The answer is yes, thanks to product roadmap software and product management systems designed to work in conjunction with the rest of the business. In doing so, the “product people” are able to operate on a platform bridged with the “sales and marketing people.”

It might sound foolishly idealistic and overly optimistic, but the goal is to establish harmony between those who build the products and those who sell them. After all, the conflict which seems to always develop between these two sets of workers represents the chief complexity of product management. A business willing to have an empowered product manager on its payroll and reliable roadmap software in their digital tool chest is more likely to avoid the project-halting internal debates that so often arise.

The efficacy of product roadmapping when it comes to developing great products is owed to the fact it helps to get everyone on the same page. A product roadmap is a resource for visually expressing the projected expectations of a product throughout its lifecycle. It’s a guiding document which can be easily displayed to the entire company and easily understood across multiple departments. It shows where all the pieces fit, and how the quality of a product will drive marketing, which will, in turn, drive sales.

Perhaps Jobs was a little too jaded by his forced exile from Apple to provide a truly accurate perspective on how great products are made. While it’s certainly true that a company can’t count on the marketing department to decide the attributes of a product, it’s unfair to label them as the source of diminished quality. No matter how incredible a product becomes during development, it means little without the skills and insights of marketing and sales professionals. With this in mind, it’s important for modern companies to harmonize these two camps through effective product management systems and software.