Fewer than 30 products. How to run the task force on your line this week.

A soap company with more than 100 products, where 5 of them make nearly all the money. A piece of software that started as 1 idea and now has 60 tools inside it.

I know both founders, and I've had the same question about both businesses: how do you decide what to cut?

Jay Elliot's answer starts with a different question.

If you've run the exercises in Parts 1 through 5, you have the pieces on a page: the list, the three, the verdicts, the arithmetic, and the 2 sentences about the people. This is where they become a meeting. If you haven't, run the meeting anyway. You'll fill the page in as you go.

"What are you trying to accomplish?"

That's Jay's question. What are you trying to accomplish with your products? What are you trying to make? If the plan is to put everything on the shelf and see what sticks, his answer was that he couldn't help with that. There are 2 ways to go, in his view. You build for everybody, or you build the product you'd want yourself. A line of 100 is what happens when nobody answered the question and the shelf kept filling anyway.

The soap company's revenue comes from 5 products. The software started as 1 idea. The numbers already say what each line should be. The meeting below is how you get the line to agree with them.

Fewer than 30

Steve had a way. Jay calls it the Say No principle, and in Leading Apple with Steve Jobs he says Steve followed it with a passion. "He came to understand that the challenge isn't which product ideas you decide to pursue, but which ones you decide not to."

The number Jay attaches to it: Steve could brag that Apple, by then a $30 billion company, had fewer than 30 major products. Those were the ones he'd decided to pursue after saying no to hundreds of others.

The exercise he used to get there is one you've seen if you've taken Day 3 of the free course, so I'll give it a paragraph. At the Top 100 retreats Steve would ask for the 10 things Apple should do next, then cross out 7. Jay's explanation of why it worked: there were only ever 3. The other 7 were made up, because an empty line on a page makes people feel they ought to fill it.

It wasn't killing anything

The famous version of this story is 1997. Steve comes back, and the product line gets cut to the bone. Jay wasn't at Apple by then, so what follows is his read from outside, and it isn't the usual one.

Steve already knew what he wanted when he came back, Jay says, because it was what he wanted when he left. Nothing had happened in between. Start with the basic product and get it right first, and everything that doesn't fit that is out the door. He'd evaluated the company years earlier. He was finishing the job.

Which is why, in Jay's telling, it wasn't killing anything.

It was redefining what Apple is.

The Newton is his example. Steve didn't keep it as a product. He kept it as an idea, and in Jay's telling the idea came back years later as a phone. A line that's been redefined around what the company's for doesn't need to kill things. It needs to know what it is, and then everything on the shelf either fits or it doesn't.

Run it this week

The whole series as 1 meeting. 60 minutes, 3 people, the page in the middle. Every line points at the part it came from.

0:00 · The page. Everything with your logo on it. Products, plans, tiers, add-ons, the legacy version. What exists, not the roadmap. (Part 2)

0:05 · The three. Cost, user, channel, in the room. The person who knows what each thing costs you, the person who knows what it does for the user, the person who knows how it really sells. (Part 2)

0:10 · The defense. 5 minutes per item, 1 question from its owner: what makes this worthy of the line? Not "is it selling?" (Part 2)

0:25 · The verdicts. Whoever took each product home reads their page: what it promised, what happened, keep / fix / pull. 3 words. (Part 3)

0:35 · The arithmetic. The attention line next to the revenue line. Name the Apple III. (Part 4)

0:40 · The people. For anything with people attached, the 2 sentences, read out loud: what happens to them, and who says it. (Part 5)

0:45 · The standard. Would we ship this today? If no, it isn't moved out at a discount. It's pulled. (Part 1)

0:50 · The decision. Fix, cut, reposition, test, or stop. 1 per product. Written before anyone leaves.

0:55 · The cadence. Same time next week. A month is long enough to build the wrong thing all the way to done.

Then print the page and put it where the product decisions actually get made. Jay's phrase for that place is the kitchen table, because, he writes, that's where founders decide things, at night, with the product in front of them.

What Jay doesn't claim

Jay wasn't at Apple in 1997. His read of it is from outside, and I've labeled it that way. "Fewer than 30 major products" is his statement about the Apple of 2012, when he wrote it. The soap company and the software suite are real businesses run by people I know; I haven't named them.

The turn

The task force was never a purge. It was the line being redefined around what the company was for... and then every product had to re-earn its place against that definition.

That's why Jay won't call 1997 killing anything. Steve wasn't deleting products. He was answering "what are we trying to accomplish?" and letting the line follow. The meeting above does the same thing at your scale, every week, in an hour, and it ends with a written decision about every item on the page.

Every product that survives this meeting still has to answer the 4 questions, and the questions are the part you can't do from a list. They're the book. Get the book · $47 →