Apple Marketing SVP Greg Joswiak on why Steve Jobs, in their first meeting, refused to look at the product roadmap and wanted to talk about where Apple was going instead: The company was in bad shape. "Here again we were struggling to say the least at that point," Joswiak recalls. The leaders of product marketing and engineering gathered for their first meeting with Steve, and nobody was sure how to open it. "We weren't quite sure how to start the meeting and Phil says, 'Hey, do you want to show you our product roadmaps,' which are, you know, our plans for the product for the next couple years. And Steve stops and he says, 'No, let's talk about where we're going, because if we don't know where we're going, no map's going to get us there.'" Instead of a roadmap review, the meeting became a reset of the company's thinking. "We started to retrench our thinking and reminding us that great companies fail because they forget about creating great products, and that we were going to put the product back. It's the focus of everything that we do." The principle Jobs installed was deliberately simple, and Joswiak is candid about how it sounded at the time: "…with this naive belief that if you create great products, there'll be a market for that." What stunned the room was hearing it from a CEO. "Our heads were like, wow. We had never had a CEO who was telling us that we were going to talk about where we're going and how the products were going to be getting us there, and where we… how we were going to transform this business." @gregjoz treats that meeting as the origin point of everything since: "…to see all the different places that that thinking took us, and where we are today… I feel incredibly blessed to have spent the last 40 years of my life here. And what's more exciting is all the great stuff we have in front of us, because we are working on some pretty cool stuff."