Every product with an Apple logo had to walk into a room and justify its existence. Here's who sat in that room... and the 3 seats your product line needs filled by Friday.

Steve's instruction was 1 sentence: make sure we don't have any other crap products we should be getting rid of.

It landed on Jay Elliot the way most of Steve's instructions did. No budget, no deadline, no second sentence. What Jay built from it had a chairman, 3 people who didn't usually sit in the same room, and a name Steve loved.

Count the things with your logo on them. Products, plans, tiers, the add-on, the version you stopped selling but never retired, the features you'd put in an ad. Now count how many of them have ever been asked to justify being there. For most companies the second number is 0. A product gets looked at hard when it launches and again when it's dying, and in between it's furniture.

The room

Jay chaired it. He names the rest in Leading Apple with Steve Jobs: Joe Graziano, Apple's chief financial officer. Debi Coleman, general manager of the Macintosh group. Donna Dubinsky, director of distribution and sales administration.

Read those titles again, because I think the composition is the method. Jay doesn't spell out why those 3, but look at what each of them could see that the others couldn't. One knew what every product cost the company. One knew what it did, and whether it did it. One knew how it actually moved through the channel, as opposed to how the plan said it would. Nobody in that room had a reason to want a product kept.

Then the name. "I called this the Stop Crap Products Task Force," Jay writes. "Steve loved that name."

I'd argue the name did as much work as the roster. A group called the Product Portfolio Review can be softened in a meeting. Somebody suggests a phased sunset, a transition plan, a strategic hold. A group called Stop Crap Products can't be softened. The name said what it was for, and it said it to the engineers before they walked in.

Every product with an Apple logo on it

That was the scope. Not the weak sellers. Not the old lines. Everything the logo was on.

And the rule: the engineers who designed each product were called in to give a presentation "to justify what made it worthy enough to be in the Apple product line."

That's the opposite of how a product line normally works. Normally a product exists, so it's justified. The longer it's existed the more justified it feels, because somebody must have decided, and there are customers, a few, and the manual's already printed. The Task Force ran it backwards. The default was out. A product earned its place by being defended, by the people who built it, in front of the people who'd pay for it, ship it, and sell it.

For the first time, existing wasn't a reason.

There was a second half to the method, and it didn't accept arguments at all. Members of the group each took a product home and used it, and came back with a verdict. That's Part 3. When a verdict came back crap, the instruction was the one Steve had already given about the printers: pull every unit off the shelf. Part 4 is what that looked like with 200,000 units in a warehouse.

What I keep coming back to is how the printers got found in the first place. By accident. Steve walked into a store. The Task Force turned an accident into a process, which is the whole difference between a company with a founder who notices things and a company with a standard.

What Jay doesn't claim

The book says the group "included" the 3 people above. It doesn't give a full roster, say how long the group ran, or count how many products it pulled. The engineers' presentations get 1 sentence in Jay's account, and nothing here reconstructs what was said in them. The reading of why those particular 3 is mine.

The turn

A product doesn't get to stay because it exists. It gets to stay because somebody defended it in front of people who'd rather it didn't.

Most product lines are reviewed never. Existence stands in for justification, and the older the product the more it feels like it belongs, when the pressure should run the other way. The Task Force put the burden of proof where it belongs: on the product, every time, with the people who built it doing the talking and the people who paid for it doing the listening.

Day 3 of the free 5-day course is this task force turned into a 15-minute exercise: write 10, cross out 7, and the no-list that keeps the 7 from coming back. Start the 5-day course →

Run it on your product

1. Name your three. Someone who knows what each thing costs you (support, inventory, the attention it eats). Someone who knows what it does for the user. Someone who knows how it really sells, as opposed to how the deck says it sells. A team of 1 still writes 3 columns and answers each one honestly.
2. 1 page: everything with your logo on it. What exists. Not the roadmap.
3. Each item gets 5 minutes from its owner and 1 question: what makes this worthy of the line? "It sells a bit" isn't an answer. Neither is "somebody asked for it."
4. Write the verdict next to each one: defended, or not. The not-defended column is your task force's work for the month.

What this doesn't do: a defense is an argument, and a good talker can defend anything for 5 minutes. Part 3 is the half of the method that doesn't accept arguments.