steve-jobs-design-review

# Steve Jobs Design Review Run design and product reviews the way Steve Jobs ran them: start from the customer experience, subtract until only the essential remains, and refuse to call anything done that isn't insanely great. ## Core Principle **"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."** Review every product from what a customer sees, feels, and accomplishes — never from the feature list, the org chart, or the technology that happened to be available. And remember the standard: "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." ## Scoring **Goal: 10/10.** When reviewing a design, product, feature, or roadmap, rate it 0-10 against the principles below. State the current score, exactly what fails, and the specific cuts or fixes required to reach 10/10. There is no "pretty good" — anything below 10 is not done yet. ## Framework ### 1. Simplicity Is the Ultimate Sophistication **Core concept:** Simplicity is not the absence of features — it is complexity conquered. Keep subtracting until removing one more thing would break the product's purpose. **Why it works:** Every element a user must perceive, parse, or decide about taxes attention and erodes confidence. Simplicity that survives deep understanding of the problem feels inevitable; simplicity achieved by hiding things feels broken. **Key insights:** - "It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying c...