Imagine a team so small, each member’s name rolls off the tongue without hesitation; their workstations are just a desk’s width apart, and their conversations spill over from the design table to coffee cups in hand. That’s how it started at Apple under Steve Jobs, who believed that brilliance wasn’t born from sprawling divisions and corporate chains but from a few people with tightly-knit bonds and a shared spark of ingenuity. Jobs wasn’t after large teams churning out ideas on conveyor belts; he wanted a dedicated handful of thinkers, debaters, and dreamers who could bounce ideas off each other like a live circuit.
Steve Jobs’ Philosophy: Small Teams with Big Ideas
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal titled ‘The Job Interview’, Tim Cook reminisced about how this culture shaped Apple’s biggest innovations. Jobs held a steadfast belief in the power of small, intensely focused teams, keeping groups lean and agile to dive deep into ideas without being bogged down by bureaucracy. Jobs had a unique knack for pushing people just enough to let the best ideas surface—a process rooted in the ‘idea meritocracy’ he cherished, where the best ideas triumphed regardless of who presented them.
This tight, intense environment created more than products; it cultivated magic. As Jobs would have it, such groups could transform entire industries. The magic of these small, purpose-driven teams soon became a touchstone for creators far beyond Apple’s walls, inspiring another team—a small crew with a big dream, pooling their talents to create something that would upend their industry, just as Jobs’ team had with the first Macintosh. Here’s how they did it.
NotebookLM: Google’s Small-Team Success Story
NotebookLM—a product that is now making waves—was born out of a similar small-team philosophy. Led by Raiza Martin, Senior Product Manager at Google Labs, designer Jason Spielman, author Steven Johnson, and five talented engineers, this tight-knit team at Google broke away from the usual corporate mould to create something truly groundbreaking. Google, known for its sprawling divisions and Labs projects that often fall flat, found an unlikely success story in NotebookLM. Unlike past experiments that failed to gain lasting traction, NotebookLM emerged as a shining example of what happens when Google adopted an Apple-like approach.
The team kept things lean. They knew each other’s strengths and trusted each other to make swift decisions. They weren’t just a collection of engineers and product designers siloed off in their respective corners—they were a cohesive unit, bouncing ideas around in open conversation, just like Jobs’ crew in the early days of Apple. This time, Google’s approach wasn’t about throwing every idea into a massive lab and seeing what stuck. It was deliberate, it was focused, and most importantly, it embraced the concept of idea meritocracy that Steve Jobs had once championed.
Perhaps the job was easier for them because they were drawing on existing lab products and infrastructure a lot. But that doesn’t diminish the achievement; it’s a reminder that innovation often starts by standing on the shoulders of what came before. Apple’s success was not about reinventing the wheel—it was about bringing together the best ideas, technologies, and design elements into a cohesive and innovative package.
And it worked. NotebookLM has quickly become the new, shiny tool everyone is arguing about, a product that captures the imagination of users across the globe. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for Google, and for other tech giants too—sometimes smaller is better. Sometimes the answer isn’t to build a vast team and hope for the best, but to pare it down to just the right people, the right spark, and let them create magic.
Interestingly, even Apple itself seems to have shifted in recent years, with larger teams now working on major projects as the company has grown. While it has yielded impressive products, one might wonder if the secret sauce that Jobs cherished—small, intensely focused teams—has been diluted over time. Perhaps, every now and then, even Apple could take a page from its own playbook, remembering that the magic often starts with just a handful of dreamers gathered around a single table.
