Simplicity Is Harder Than You Think
Lessons from Apple and My Product Creation Journey
As product managers, we obsess over features, roadmaps and deadlines. We balance requests from design, engineering, marketing and a user base that always wants “just one more thing.” It’s easy to forget how fickle our audience can be. According to a Nielsen Norman Group study, people decide whether to stay or leave a page in less than ten seconds. Ten seconds. That means all the polish we pour into a product is judged in the time it takes to blink. If we fail to connect quickly, our work is invisible.
Steve Jobs understood this better than anyone. He famously said, “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains”. His companies became icons not because they packed in more features but because they removed anything that wasn’t essential. The original iPod had one wheel and one button . Its magic lay not in doing everything but in doing one thing perfectly.
The tension between complexity and focus
In the “Experience Cluster” I oversee, we manage a portfolio of products and interactions that need to feel cohesive across multiple brands and contexts. I’ve spent much of my career as a technologist, producer and designer; now I sit in the sweet spot where vision meets execution. That means I’m often the person teammates come to when they want to cram one more feature into a release. I get it—clients want to delight their customers, engineers want to showcase their craft, and designers want to push creative boundaries. But those competing priorities are exactly why many teams ignore Jobs’s rule Simplicity isn’t as flashy as a new widget. It doesn’t always wow stakeholders in a demo. Yet it’s what makes products usable and memorable.
I’ve fallen into the complexity trap myself. Early in my career I co‑led a redesign of an analytics dashboard for an ad‑tech platform. Energized by the possibilities, my team and I added every metric we could think of—page views, bounce rates, conversion funnels, heatmaps. We were proud of the data buffet. After launch? Crickets. Users were overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. We went back to the drawing board and reduced the dashboard to just three key performance indicators. The feedback was immediate: “So clean!” “Finally, I understand what matters.” That redesign taught me a hard truth: less really is more.
Practical ways to embrace simplicity
Getting to simple isn’t easy. It requires discipline and empathy. Here are a few practices I use when shepherding products:
- Prioritize ruthlessly. Ask yourself: What’s the one thing the user absolutely needs here? If it doesn’t support that goal, it’s probably clutter.
- Use the “grandma test.” Could someone who’s not tech‑savvy—your grandmother, a friend outside your industry—complete the task without instructions? If not, your design still has cognitive friction.
- Say “no” more often. It feels counterintuitive, but focus comes from subtracting. Jobs killed a slew of Apple products to concentrate on the Mac, iPod and iPhone. Saying “no” isn’t failure—it’s strategy.
- Test obsessively. Simplicity isn’t a gut feeling; it’s validated through user testing. Watch where people stumble. Simplify. Repeat. In our cluster, we do iterative prototypes and remote usability sessions. It’s humbling—but nothing beats seeing real people succeed.
The emotional payoff
Simplicity is not just good UX; it’s emotional design. When a product “just works,” users feel empowered and grateful. They tell their friends. They come back. In my own career, projects that have won awards—from Cannes Lions to Webby Awards—were rarely the most feature‑rich. They were the ones that solved a core problem elegantly. That’s the secret Jobs understood: we earn loyalty by reducing friction, not by adding options.
As the product manager of the Experience Cluster, I’m continually reminded that my job isn’t to shepherd the most features to market. It’s to create seamless experiences across all touchpoints. That means sweating every detail so the complexity stays behind the scenes. When I feel the urge to add “just one more tab,” I think back to that dashboard lesson and to Jobs’s advice. Simplicity isn’t about being minimalistic for its own sake; it’s about making technology humane.
Alex