Design & UX

Steve Jobs Design Review

Name: Steve Jobs
Author: Walter Isaacson
ISBN: 1451648537

Jobs-style reviews: ruthless simplicity, focus, binary verdicts

Review designs, products, and roadmaps the way Steve Jobs ran reviews: start from the customer experience, subtract until only the essential remains, and deliver a binary verdict — insanely great, or not done. This skill distills Jobs' documented review practices from Walter Isaacson's biography, Ken Segall's "Insanely Simple," and Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection" into a protocol your AI agent can run on any product.

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

View on Amazon →

Install this skill

npx skills add wondelai/skills/steve-jobs-design-review

Key Concepts

What your agent learns

Simplicity Is the Ultimate Sophistication

Simplicity is complexity conquered, not features hidden. Keep subtracting until removing one more thing would break the product's purpose.

Focus Means Saying No

Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. Force-rank the roadmap, cut everything below the top three, and require a kill for every add.

Design Is How It Works

Judge flows, latency, and failure states — not just the mockup's beauty. "It just works" is a design spec: zero configuration, zero manual.

Own the Whole Experience

The product is every touchpoint — discovery, first run, daily use, support, billing, cancellation. The worst touchpoint sets the perceived quality.

Demo or It Doesn't Exist

Review working artifacts on the real device, never specs or slides. Run demo derbies between competing ideas and let one decider pick.

About the Author

Walter Isaacson

Bestselling biographer of Steve Jobs, former CEO of CNN & editor of Time

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling biographer of Steve Jobs, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin. A former CEO of CNN and editor of Time, he wrote the authorized Jobs biography from over forty exclusive interviews — the definitive record of how Jobs reviewed products and made design decisions.

View Book →

Example Prompts

Try these with the skill installed

Review this landing page like Steve Jobs would — verdict, cut list, fix list using steve-jobs-design-review skill

Design review

Cut my Q3 roadmap to the essential three bets and justify every kill using steve-jobs-design-review skill

Focus & scope

Audit my onboarding end-to-end, from signup to first value, as one experience using steve-jobs-design-review skill

E2E experience

Find the back-of-the-fence surfaces in my app that fail the quality bar using steve-jobs-design-review skill

Detail audit

Install Steve Jobs Design Review

Free, open-source, and ready in 30 seconds.

npx skills add wondelai/skills/steve-jobs-design-review

Browse on GitHub See All Skills

MIT Licensed · Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Cowork & OpenClaw · No account needed

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