Steve Jobs, Product Manager: The Most Famous One You’ve Ever Heard Of
If you ask a room full of product managers to name the most famous PM in history, the answer that echoes back is almost always the same: Steve Jobs. Yes, his title said CEO. But the way he ran Apple—obsessive product reviews, ruthless prioritization, end‑to‑end control of experience, and launching narratives that made technology feel like destiny—reads like the job description of a world‑class PM with a megaphone.
Jony Ive, who sat next to Jobs for decades, captured it bluntly: “Steve was the most remarkably focused person I ever met.” Ive added that Jobs paired “clarity of thought” with a “relentless” drive to make the thing, not the slide, better. Tim Cook put it another way when Jobs passed in 2011: “His spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
Below, a pragmatic tour of Jobs’s major accomplishments as a product manager, why they worked, and the failures that made him better. Along the way, I’ll weave in quotes from the people who built Apple’s products with him.
What did Jobs do as a product manager?
Set a product North Star and said “no” a lot. Tony Fadell—who led the iPod and helped start iPhone—recalled Jobs’s marching orders during the iPod’s inception: “We are going to build iPod… If anyone gets in your way… call me.”
Orchestrated end‑to‑end experience. Phil Schiller, Apple’s longtime product‑marketing chief, said the iPod “changed everybody’s view of Apple,” and that mindset led Apple to re‑imagine the phone as a complete product: hardware, software, services, and distribution.
Hired people who could argue with him. Former iOS chief Scott Forstall recounted his first interview: Jobs barged in, peppered questions, and concluded, “We’re giving you an offer… Pretend you care in the interviews.”
Demanded taste. Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac team: Jobs had a “reality distortion field,” but the point was to push for “what seemed impossible.” (Hertzfeld’s essays remain a primary source on early Apple.)
Wasn’t the engineer—was the editor. Steve Wozniak once quipped, “Steve Jobs never programmed in his life.” His contribution was product judgment, not code.
The (mostly) greatest hits—and why they mattered
1) Macintosh + Desktop Publishing (1984–1986)
What: The original Macintosh married a GUI and mouse to consumer hardware. In 1985–86, pairing the Mac with Apple’s LaserWriter and Aldus PageMaker ignited desktop publishing. Apple sold 250,000 Macs in 1984; it hit 500,000 by September 1985.
Why it worked (PM lens): Jobs didn’t just ship a computer; he bundled the use case. The LaserWriter plus PageMaker turned the Mac into a layout and print studio. The Computer History Museum notes PageMaker “helped drive graphic designers to the Mac.” The LaserWriter’s PostScript support made complex layouts practical.
Employee voice: Jony Ive remembers Jobs’s “clarity of thought” about what the product was for, not just what it could do.
2) NeXT → OS X → iOS (1996–2011)
What: Apple acquired NeXT in 1996/97 for roughly $429M, bringing Jobs back and turning NeXTSTEP into the foundation of Mac OS X (and later iOS).
Why it worked: A PM dream: reuse a modern, modular OS to build a portfolio. OS X enabled consistent APIs, stability, and—crucially—became the base for iPhone OS. The CHM recounts how Apple weighed BeOS versus NeXT and chose the latter; the rest is platform history.
Employee voice: Forstall later led the iPhone software effort and famously steered demos straight to Jobs’s taste: build it, show it, decide.
3) iMac and the “digital hub” (1998–2001)
What: iMac’s translucent all‑in‑one design reset Apple’s industrial vocabulary and kicked off a “digital hub” strategy that would anchor the iPod and iTunes.
Why it worked: Jobs focused the line, killed clutter, and aimed the Mac at everyday creative tasks. He aligned hardware, software, and (soon) the Apple Retail Store to demo value in person. Apple’s first two stores in 2001 drew 7,700 people and $600,000 in opening‑weekend sales; by 2012 Apple Stores led retail in sales per square foot at around $5,600–$6,050. (Apple, MacRumors, Business Insider, Engadget)
Employee voice: Schiller again: after iPod, Apple looked for “another category it could reinvent,” a template created by iMac’s turnaround momentum.
4) iPod + iTunes Store (2001–2010)
What: Jobs green‑lit a bet‑the‑company music player and licensed store. By 2022, Apple had sold an estimated 450 million iPods. The iTunes Store passed 25 billion songs by 2013. (Wikipedia, Apple)
Why it worked: A PM masterclass in removing friction: rip → buy → sync in one ecosystem, with a clean price point and relentless UX polish. Wired chronicled how the store sold a million songs in its first week and became the legal alternative to piracy. (WIRED)
Employee voice: Fadell described Jobs’s conviction during the iPod’s precarious start: when obstacles arose, “call me.” That air cover is how you ship v1s.
5) iPhone + App Store (2007–2011)
What: The iPhone combined a capacitive multitouch screen with OS X‑derived software. In its first weekend (2008 3G model), Apple sold 1 million units and logged 10 million app downloads. Less than three years later, the App Store crossed 10 billion downloads. (MacRumors, Apple)
Why it worked: Jobs treated the phone like a computing platform with a curated marketplace, not a gadget. The App Store’s explosive traction reframed mobile economics and developer incentives. Reuters marked the 10‑billion milestone, underscoring Apple’s lead in mobile software distribution. (Reuters)
Employee voice: Schiller recalled heavy skepticism from industry veterans and said the iPhone reframed Apple’s ambition: “This really changed everybody’s view of Apple.”
6) Pixar (1986–2006)
What: Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilm, stewarded it to Toy Story—the first feature‑length computer‑animated film—and sold to Disney in 2006 for about $7.4B, becoming Disney’s largest individual shareholder. Toy Story grossed $373–394M worldwide and rewrote animation. (TIME, M&A Community Portal, Wikipedia, The Numbers)
Why it worked: Vision + patience. Jobs saw a product (stories) in a technology lab. As a “product manager,” he backed a consumer outcome (family films) over a tech demo.
Employee voice: Pixar veterans often credit the culture of quality and iteration—principles Jobs demanded at Apple as well.
7) Apple as the world’s most valuable company (2011)
What: In August 2011, Apple briefly surpassed Exxon to become the most valuable public company on Earth, a symbolic capstone to its product run. (The Guardian, Reuters)
Why it worked: A portfolio of hits plus flywheel businesses (App Store, iTunes), a retail engine, and a brand powered by customer delight.
Employee voice: Cook’s internal memo after a major legal win called it a win for values—an echo of Jobs’s product ethos: ship excellence first.
How Jobs worked (from the people who were there)
Weekly product reviews as a forcing function. Schiller and Forstall’s testimonies from the Samsung trial show how deeply he drove details, from the home button to the “lust factor.”
Demo culture. Engineers built and showed—fast. Ken Kocienda, who created the original iPhone keyboard, has discussed Apple’s demo‑driven design and Jobs’s “unrelenting focus” in interviews.
Taste over precedent. Wozniak’s remark about Jobs not coding underscores that Jobs’s superpower was editorial: saying no until the product felt right.
Narrative clarity. Ive: Jobs’s clarity of thought and purpose gave the team permission to cut, simplify, and perfect—core PM work at scale.
Where Jobs failed (and what those failures taught)
Even great PMs trip. Jobs’s misses are a syllabus in product humility:
Apple Lisa (1983) — A groundbreaking GUI system priced at $9,995, aimed at offices Apple didn’t know how to sell to. The Computer History Museum calls it “Apple’s most influential failure” for pioneering ideas that the Mac later made mainstream.
Apple III (1980) — Famously overheated after Apple’s fanless design choice. The machine gained a reputation for heat‑related instability; later fixes couldn’t salvage the brand damage.
NeXT hardware (1988–1993) — Gorgeous cube, tiny market. As AppleInsider summarized years later, NeXT the product stumbled even as the software became Apple’s future. (See: OS X.)
Power Mac G4 Cube (2000) — An icon that flopped. WIRED’s postmortem: “the coolest computer ever… It bombed,” selling under 150,000 units before discontinuation in 2001.
MobileMe (2008) — A launch plagued by outages. Jobs told staff the debut was “not our finest hour” and “not up to Apple’s standards,” then reshuffled leadership.
iPhone 4 ‘Antennagate’ (2010) — Signal drops when held a certain way. Jobs’s line at the press conference: “We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect,” followed by free cases.
What did these misses teach?
Price/value alignment matters (Lisa, Cube).
Physics wins arguments (Apple III thermals).
Ship the platform, not just the box (NeXT’s hardware vs. software legacy).
Operational excellence is product (MobileMe).
Own mistakes, fix fast (Antennagate).
Why call Jobs the most famous product manager?
Because the work he did maps near‑perfectly to the work PMs do—just on a historic stage:
Choosing the problem and the bet. Fadell’s iPod recollection shows Jobs’s tolerance for risk when the narrative and timing were right.
Integrating disciplines. The iPhone was the quintessential cross‑functional project: industrial design (Ive), silicon, software (Forstall), services, and go‑to‑market (Schiller).
Building systems, not SKUs. NeXT → OS X → iOS → App Store wasn’t a one‑off—this was a compounding platform bet.
Storytelling as a feature. From “1,000 songs in your pocket” to “there’s an app for that,” the narrative lowered adoption friction and aligned the org.
Andy Hertzfeld once described Jobs as a perfectionist for whom “good enough isn’t good enough”—and while that attitude bruised feelings, it also produced shipping art. As Schiller put it, the iPod “changed everybody’s view” of what Apple could be, inside and out. Cook’s tribute—“his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple”—isn’t about mystique; it’s about a process for making excellent things.
A note on scale: the numbers tell their own story
App Store: 10 million downloads in its first weekend; 10 billion in under 3 years; later 50 billion (2013). (Apple, MacStories)
iTunes Store: 25 billion songs downloaded (2013). (Apple)
iPod: ~450 million units over two decades. (Wikipedia)
iPhone momentum: 26.9 million units in one quarter (Q4 2012) as smartphones ate the world. (Apple)
Retail: among the highest sales per square foot in retail—north of $5,600/sq. ft. in several analyses. (Business Insider, Engadget)
Market cap: Apple briefly became No. 1 in the world in August 2011—during Jobs’s final months as CEO. (The Guardian, Reuters)
The balanced takeaway
Jobs wasn’t a saint, and Apple didn’t win by magic. The organization built under him—and later run by others—made the wins possible. But if you’re a product manager, the Jobs playbook is surprisingly concrete:
Define the job to be done in human language. Desktop publishing, 1,000 songs, a phone that is a computer.(WIRED)
Relentlessly edit scope and say no. (Ive, Fadell, and Forstall’s stories are variations on this theme.)
Make demos the center of gravity. Don’t pitch opinions; show the product.
Ship ecosystems, not features. OS + device + store + retail is why Apple’s products stuck. (Apple)
When you miss, own it and fix it. MobileMe, Antennagate—acknowledge, remediate, move on.
If all of that sounds like the job of a product manager, that’s the point. Jobs built Apple’s greatest hits the way great PMs build anything: by aligning reality to a crisp vision, one “no” and one shipped demo at a time.
“Steve was the most remarkably focused person I ever met.” — Jony Ive
“We’re giving you an offer… Pretend you care in the interviews.” — Steve Jobs to Scott Forstall
“This really changed everybody’s view of Apple.” — Phil Schiller on the iPod’s impact
“His spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.” — Tim Cook
“Steve Jobs never programmed in his life.” — Steve Wozniak (with affection and accuracy)
That’s why Steve Jobs is the most famous product manager. Not because he was perfect, but because he made product management feel like a creative act—and proved, repeatedly, that it could change the world.