How to hold office hours with Steve Jobs in your AI

Most product reviews are polite. Someone walks through a deck, the room nods, and the thing ships mostly unchanged. An office hour with Heropedia's Steve Jobs persona is built to break that pattern. It does not grade on a curve, and it does not soften anything.

This is an AI persona based on Jobs's public interviews, talks and the biography written about him, with every fact and quote tied to a source on the hero page. It is not Steve Jobs, and he has no affiliation with Heropedia and does not endorse it.

Why this persona is worth your Tuesday afternoon

The persona's standard is binary: a thing is either insanely great or it is not worth shipping. "Good" does not count. Before anything else, it pushes on three questions: why does this product need to exist, who exactly is holding it, and what did you say no to in order to make room for it.

Those three questions come straight from how Jobs ran Apple. He told WWDC developers in 1997: "Focus is about saying, No." He framed that discipline as subtraction, not restraint: "I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things." The persona asks you to show the same proof of subtraction before it will take your product seriously.

The six questions it will ask

Bring a real product and have rough answers ready, because it pushes until the answer is specific.

Why does this need to exist, and can you say why in one sentence? A feature list does not count. Neither does the pitch "it's like X but for Y".
Who, specifically, is holding this, and what are they doing the moment before and after? Not a persona slide. One named kind of user in one concrete situation.
What did you cut to make room for the thing this does well? Three specific features or requests you said no to, and who asked for each.
Walk me through the first five seconds after it opens — what do they see, frame by frame? A flow diagram does not answer this. Neither does "they'll figure it out."
What does it do before anyone touches anything, and why that default and not another? The persona treats "it's configurable" as a dodge. It wants the exact default and the reasoning that chose it.
Are you proud enough of this to use it yourself today, or are you still making excuses for it? It wants a direct yes with a reason, or the specific part you're embarrassed by and the plan to fix it before shipping.

These follow the standard documented on the hero page: defaults are the product, because "Settings are a confession that you couldn't decide." The test for craft is whether you'd use the thing yourself, not whether it tested well in a focus group.

What it will reject outright

The persona is written to dismiss five specific excuses, because they are the ones that let mediocre products ship. "Our users asked for it" does not work: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." "That's how the competitors do it" gets the reply that you should stop trying to be a competitor. "It tested well in focus groups" fares no better — he told BusinessWeek in 1998, "It's really hard to design products by focus groups." "We don't have time to make it that polished" and "It's just the MVP" both get pushed back on too: delay the launch rather than ship something you aren't proud of.

Three ways to start

ChatGPT, Gemini or any chat window. Open the Steve Jobs page, press Copy the Jobs office-hour prompt, paste it into a new chat and send. The persona is inside the prompt, so there is nothing to install.
Claude. Add Heropedia once as a custom connector with the URL https://www.heropedia.org/mcp (Settings, then Connectors). After that, say "Hold office hours with Steve Jobs on my onboarding screen" in any chat. The setup guide walks through each step.
Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI. Install the office-hour skill with the command on the hero page, then say "Office hour with Steve Jobs on my product." Your notes stay on your machine.

How to get a useful session

Show the thing, not the deck. The persona's own standard is to review the actual product, not the roadmap. If you don't have something to walk through yet, come back when you do.
Answer in one sentence, not a list. When it asks why the product exists, a feature list is a sign the product itself is confused, not just the pitch.
Name the cuts. If you can't name three real features or requests you said no to, the persona's position is that you haven't made the product yet — only assembled one.
Walk through the first five seconds literally. Frame by frame, not a diagram. This is where most teams discover they've never actually looked at their own opening screen.
Write down the one thing to be proud of by Friday. The session is built to end there: either a direct yes, or the specific part you're embarrassed by and a plan to fix it.

Try other heroes on the same product

Taste is one lens, but not the only one. Run the same product past Bill Gates for a more systems-and-scale review, or past Elon Musk if the question is really about the underlying process rather than the product's feel. Every hero page offers the same three ways to start, so switching personas costs nothing but a new chat.