Steve Jobs · Free lesson guide

Killing products: the power of 'no' and focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 the company was months from insolvency and shipping an incoherent range of computers, printers and handhelds. His response is often described as taste. It was closer to triage: a two-by-two grid — consumer and professional, desktop and portable — and the cancellation of everything that did not occupy a square, including products with real revenue and committed customers.

Product strategyFocusLeadership

What you'll learn

What the 1997 product grid was and how it made cancellation impersonal
Why focus is primarily a resource-concentration decision
The difference between saying no to bad ideas and saying no to good ones
How the cull directly produced the iMac and the later product line
How to run the same exercise on a portfolio, roadmap or personal workload

Key concepts

The two-by-two grid: Four squares: consumer desktop, consumer portable, pro desktop, pro portable. One product per square. The grid's real function was political — it turned every cancellation into an obvious structural consequence rather than a judgement on a team.
Saying no to good ideas: Jobs's formulation was that focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas. Killing bad projects is administration; the discipline only bites when you cancel something that would probably have worked.
Concentration of scarce talent: The binding constraint was never ideas but the number of excellent engineers and designers. Every surviving variant consumed people. The cull was a way of putting the entire capable population behind a handful of decisions.
Fewer decisions, deeper: With four products, leadership could review each in genuine detail, weekly. A forty-product portfolio makes senior attention a rounding error per product, which is how mediocrity becomes structural rather than cultural.

Why the grid worked where a review committee would not

Cancellation processes usually fail because each product has an advocate, a customer list and a plausible case. Debating them individually guarantees survival by attrition. The grid moved the decision up a level: the argument was about how many categories Apple should serve, and once that was settled the individual cancellations followed automatically. Anyone designing a portfolio cull should copy that sequencing — decide the shape first, then let the shape make the specific decisions.

The cost was real and paid immediately

Apple lost revenue, disappointed loyal users, and cancelled work people had spent years on. The Newton had genuine believers. Framing focus as painless is the most common way the lesson gets misapplied, because leaders who expect it to feel obvious abandon it at the first credible objection. The correct expectation is that the decision feels expensive at the moment you make it and correct about eighteen months later.

Running the exercise yourself

Write down every active initiative with the people it consumes, not the revenue it produces. Define the smallest number of categories that must be served for the organisation to be viable. Assign one initiative per category. Everything remaining is either merged, stopped, or explicitly funded as an exception with a named owner and a review date. The uncomfortable part is that the exception list must stay short enough to remember without looking.

How this connects to Steve Jobs

Focus is the operating decision behind everything else associated with Jobs. The integration of hardware and software, the launch craft and the design standard are all only affordable because the number of things being decided at once was kept artificially small.

Explore all Steve Jobs courses The i-Revolution: Return, Revival, and the 'Think Different' Era

Inside the membership

Killing Products: The Power of 'No' and Focus

Part of “The i-Revolution: Return, Revival, and the 'Think Different' Era” · 8 min

The full lesson covering the 1997 return, the grid and the products cancelled
The portfolio-cull worksheet with the category-first sequencing
The framework saved to your Playbook
Localised audio summary and Master chat

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