Your AI prompts might be holding you back by being too complex. I often find myself getting decent, but not truly groundbreaking, results from my queries, and I’ve been looking for a way to break through that barrier. I just saw an incredible post from a LinkedIn user who figured out how to turn an AI into a world-class product designer and strategist by using the design philosophy of Steve Jobs.
The core insight is brilliantly simple. Instead of asking the AI to just perform a task, the creator frames the request using the same demanding, user-obsessed questions Jobs was famous for. This forces the AI to abandon incremental thinking and aim for radical simplicity and elegance. It’s like having the master of focus critiquing your work and stripping away everything that isn’t absolutely essential. I was blown away when I saw how effective this was!
🧠 The Core Idea: Channeling a Design Legend
Jobs was a master of saying “no.” He believed that true innovation came from rejecting thousands of good ideas to find the one truly great one. This is an incredibly difficult discipline to practice, but the post’s author realized that an AI, when guided correctly, can be the perfect tool for it. By using Jobs’ principles as prompts, you shift the AI from being a simple content generator to a strategic partner that ruthlessly prioritizes clarity and value.
The original poster shared a fantastic example. They prompted an AI with:
I’m building a course with 47 modules. How can I make this simpler?
The AI didn’t just trim the fat; it re-architected the entire concept, distilling it down to the 5 essential modules that actually delivered the core learning objective. This is the power of the method: it doesn’t just shorten things, it finds the potent, concentrated version of your idea.
Here are the key takeaways I gathered from this savvy professional’s post:
📌 Focus on Radical Simplification
This is about more than just making things shorter; it’s about finding the absolute essence of your idea. The innovator behind the post suggests using prompts that challenge every assumption about what needs to be included. Questions like, “What’s the one thing this absolutely must do perfectly?” or “Where am I adding complexity that users don’t value?” are incredibly powerful.
Think about a website with a high bounce rate or an app that confuses users. The creator shared this prompt:
My app has 20 features but users are confused. What’s the one thing this absolutely must do perfectly?
An AI armed with this question will analyze the user journey and identify the single most critical action. It might suggest redesigning the entire home screen to feature one clear call-to-action, hiding secondary features in a menu, and rewriting the copy to focus on a single benefit. This approach transforms the AI from an assistant into a product manager who cuts straight through the feature bloat to find the core value proposition.
✅ Adopt the “Start from Zero” Mindset
We often get trapped in tweaking what already exists: polishing a resume, adjusting a workflow, or slightly modifying a marketing campaign. This innovator’s method breaks you out of that cycle with prompts designed to force a complete reinvention. The key question here is:
What would this look like if I started from zero?
This forces the AI to ignore all past constraints and build the ideal solution from scratch. Another amazing prompt the person who shared it used was:
What would this be like if it just worked magically?
I think this is a phenomenal question for tackling user friction. Imagine applying it to a clunky software onboarding process. The AI might suggest a solution with zero manual data entry, single-click social logins, and a welcome screen that’s pre-populated based on the user’s role. It designs the invisible, seamless experience that customers love. It’s about building the most intuitive path, not just patching the potholes in the old one.
💡 Pursue Elegance and the “Insanely Great”
Moving beyond just functional, this set of prompts pushes the AI to create something truly exceptional. It’s based on Jobs’ obsession with aesthetics and perfectionism. The prompts here include:
What would the most elegant solution be?
And my personal favorite:
How would I make this insanely great instead of just good?
This is the difference between a boring but informative presentation and one that captivates an audience. The post’s author notes that when you ask an AI to make a presentation “insanely great,” it doesn’t just check for typos. It might suggest a powerful narrative arc, propose compelling visuals, and even script a more memorable opening and closing. The expert also shared a “secret weapon”: starting your prompt with…
Steve Jobs would approach this design challenge by…
This single phrase primes the AI to access a whole library of design thinking principles, channeling decades of innovation into your specific problem. It’s a simple trick that completely changes the quality of the output.
This approach is a total shift in how to think about prompting. It’s not just about what you ask for, but the high-level philosophy you embed in the request.
There are even more prompts and advanced techniques in the full breakdown. The one who posted it covers everything from personal branding to product development. Definitely go check out the original post for the complete guide!
I used Steve Jobs’ innovation methods as AI prompts and discovered the power of radical simplification
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