How Steve Jobs Designed His Corporate Strategy

I’m about midway through the Steve Jobs biography and this quote really stuck out to me.  This is Jony Ive, Apple’s lead product designer, describing Steve Jobs’ frequent visits to the closely guarded design studio at Apple:

“This great room is the one place in the company where you can look around and see everything we have in the works… Steve will graze by the tables to see where all of the products are heading.  He can get a sense of the sweep of the whole company, the iPhone and iPad, the iMac and laptop and everything we’re considering.  That helps him see where the company is spending it’s energy and how things connect.  And he can ask, ‘Does doing this make sense, because over here is where we are growing a lot?’ or questions like that.  He gets to see things in relationship to each other which is pretty hard to do in a big company.  Looking at the models on these tables, he can see the future for the next three years.”

This was a real eye-opener for me.  I instantly realized how Apple is able to keep such a focused product line, with each product serving a specific market beautifully.  And it’s how they achieve the same simplicity and feel, consistently across all products in their line.

But it also shows us how important product design — and the design of the product line as a whole — is in making big-picture decisions at Apple.

The fact that they craft all of their products in the same room shows us how fluid and integrated their design and internal review process is.   And it shows how Steve Jobs was truly a designer in the way he approached business strategy.  One thing that is central to any design process is to consider the relationships between different elements, their push and pull with one another, their hierarchy of importance.  That applies when you’re designing a product, a web page, a TV commercial, and clearly in the case of Steve Jobs and Apple, the design of a corporate strategy.