The Biggest Lesson I Learned as an Apple Designer
There
are a lot of misconceptions about how Apple designs its products.
Here's the truth on how the company handles deadlines--and why you
should do the same.
From
the outside looking in, a lot of
people assume that Apple
doesn't
have internal deadlines for its products. If Apple did set a
ship
date, for example, we'd all know when the Apple iWatch is going to
hit store shelves and there would already be people camped out in
front of Apple stores, cash in hand.
But
the theory that Apple doesn't have deadlines isn't
just slightly inaccurate, it couldn't be further from the truth.
Not
only does the company set internal deadlines, it also creates
deadlines for deadlines that have their own deadlines. Every aspect
of the company's production cycle, from conception to ship date, is
calculated. But--and this is a big "but"--what makes Apple
different is that it is a company that is willing to move those
deadlines. If a product in development isn't ready to be released,
the deadline is pushed back. If an idea isn't perfect, or isn't
considered truly magical and delightful internally, it's held back,
revised, and the product given an entirely new launch date.
Just
look at recent
interviews with Tim Cook,
the company's chief executive, to see how this has played out with
products currently being designed at Apple's headquarters in
Cupertino, California. Cook always mentions new and exciting
products, but never comes close to alluding to an actual date. He
says things like, "the juices are flowing," or talks about
"the potential of exciting new product categories" and
"surprises in the works." But no date--not even an inkling
of one.
Waiting
to launch a product until its "magical" moment goes against
the concept of MVP, or minimum viable product, which has become so
trendy in business over the past few years. It's part of the lean
startup mentality that became mainstream with Eric Ries's
best-selling book, The
Lean Startup:
How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create
Radically Successful Businesses.
The
idea goes something like this: Build a product to the point at which
it's good enough, launch it quickly into the marketplace, and then
make iterations as you go while learning from your customers.
Though
there is wisdom in Ries's ideas, entrepreneurs need to be very
careful in their interpretation of what a minimum viable product
actually is. If you're launching something in a space where there are
a lot of people trying to do something similar--for example, a
consumer product--then the bar for MVP should be ridiculously high.
What This Means for Your Startup
There
are many reasons to set and meet deadlines. You may have PR lined up,
or for financial reasons need to get something out at a certain time.
And, to be clear, the concept of MVP has value, especially if you are
building something completely different from everything else that
exists.
But
if you have a hunch that what you've built isn't good enough to test
the viability of your idea, follow your gut. Move your deadline and
get the product to a place where you are proud of it. Being first
doesn't mean you're going to be successful. And you won't be able to
learn anything about the product being viable if it doesn't work.
When
my team and I were ready to launch the first version of
the Storehouse iPad
app, we missed our deadline several times. And we did so with a sense
of relief, not a feeling of dread. That's because I took what I'd
learned from my time at Apple, rather than taking an MVP
approach--and when we launched, everyone in the company was proud of
what we'd built.
Of
course, there were plenty of missing features and things we were
embarrassed about, but we were able to learn way more from having a
product with great initial traction.
And
the extra time we spent improving the product paid off--Apple
featured us in the App Store, we were awarded the 2014
Apple Design Award,
and we had influencers using the product who had found it
organically. Had we been dogmatic about the timeline we had initially
set for ourselves, sure, we may have had an immediate small spike in
traction, but not the exponential growth we experienced as the result
of taking the time to build something truly special.
There
are other companies that have learned that MVP, and "moving too
quickly," isn't the best approach to building or maintaining a
great product. Take Facebook, which recently killed its famous
internal mantra: "Move fast and break things."
Mark
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, told
a crowd of developers earlier
this year that he had made a decision to kill the motto after
learning that speed does not equal success. "What we realized
over time is that it wasn't helping us to move faster, because we had
to slow down to fix these bugs and it wasn't improving our speed,"
Zuckerberg said.
Instead,
Zuckerberg said, Facebook was going to slow down and do it right. Who
knows, maybe he learned this from watching Apple work so well in this
regard. I know I did.
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