How did Steve Jobs get his team to build revolutionary technology without being a technical person?

As someone who is tech-inclined, this has always puzzled me.

How did he envision these machines that his team built without having the technical knowledge?

I was thinking about this today because, in our company, it always feels like innovation has to come from me.

In our company, most of the breakthrough ideas have come from me.

I’m the person who knows what needs to be done and has the know-how to execute and build those ideas.

The problem is that innovation in our company is bottlenecked by me.

I’m the person who thinks up the new ideas and executes them.

I initially thought this was a superpower.

Now, I see that this is massively slowing us down, but I couldn’t see another way.

I had a conversation with ChatGPT that made this clearer.

Instead of thinking about an idea and how to make the idea happen, I need to think about the questions that will help define the problem and define the constraints.

You can create great things without having the technical ability to do so, as long as you know how to define the problem well.

So when I get an idea for something that can help our company, instead of inventing the “answer” (the tools, processes, systems) to the problem I’m trying to solve,

I need to invest time into “inventing” the questions:

• “How can we achieve ‘X’ result?”

• “What would prevent us from doing 10X the output?”

• “What type of person could easily do this task and enjoy it?”

• “What is preventing us from lowering our prices by 1/2?”

• “What’s preventing us from raising our prices by 100X?”

By having the right questions, you can use other people’s creativity.

Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer, but:

• He understood systems

• He understood what “good” felt like

• He understood constraints (simplicity, elegance, end-to-end control)

Jobs didn’t know how to implement things.

He knew what tradeoffs were unacceptable.

I would imagine that his delegation was more like:

• “How can we make the screen made out of glass?”

• “How can we make this machine be a complete square?”

• “How can we eliminate these buttons?”

His delegation wasn’t:

• “Here’s the step-by-step process for how we need to build this machine.”

• “Here’s how to solve this problem.”

It might sound obvious, but that’s how I typically delegate.

I usually give people well-written SOPs once I’ve built the system.

My takeaway:

I need to get better at asking questions.