Tesla vet says that ‘reviewing real products’ — not mockups — is the key to staying innovative

Summary

GM’s EVs have been on a roll lately. After selling just the Chevy Bolt for years, a wave of new models — now up to 17 fully electrified vehicles — has pushed the automaker into second place in the U.S. behind Tesla. How did it get there? With a little help from a Tesla veteran. GM board member Jon McNeil was president of Tesla during the development and introduction of the Model 3, a crucial period of the company’s growth. One of the things he credits for Tesla’s success is how Elon Musk ran product meetings. “No slides was our first rule,” McNeil told the audience earlier this month at TC All Stage in Boston. “You have to be reviewing real product.” Every week, senior leadership would sit down with product leaders to review their progress. The practice was inspired by an encounter Musk had with Steve Jobs, McNeil said. “There was this belief that I think is true: Steve Jobs didn’t have a ton of time or patience for Elon in the early days. And early in the early days, Elon would try to chase Steve down at events and parties in Silicon Valley for advice. And Steve didn’t like Elon, and so would often turn his back to him when he approached him. “But one night, Elon got lucky and said, ‘Steve, if you had one piece of advice for me as a young entrepreneur’ — he had just just done PayPal and was joining the team at Tesla — ‘what would that be?’ Steve said, ‘Elon, you’re now in the hardware business, but the hardware business is a lot like the software business. If you want to be successful in business, you have to get one thing right, and that is, you have to have a perfect product. And if the product is beautiful, it will sell itself.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 Musk took that to heart, McNeil said, and the concept of a perfect product became central to product development at Tesla. “The thing we were looking for first of all was surprise and delight. Like, are we doing something that is going to just make somebody go wow or laugh or have fun?...