Book notes: Inside Apple

22/01/24

I don’t read book summaries. Neither should you. The following are mostly notes to myself, and are my interpretations.

This belongs to my collection of five books to learn about Apple's design:

Like me, if you love Apple, get all of them. Read them slowly. I've gifted lot of these to the NATIVE (Urban Company's hardware division) team. I'm yet to read Build & Jony Ive. Planning to read them in the next few months.

I picked this book at the start of Jan 2024 because we were amidst restructuring the organisation with minor team changes and deciding the portfolio for the year. We also had Industrial Designers join the team in full-time capacity. We are about to design everything in-house. The time felt absolutely right to learn to set the right standards for the team.

People at Apple working on launch events are given watermarked copies of a booklet called Rules of the Road that details every milestone leading up to launch day. In the booklet is a legal statement whose message is clear: If this copy ends up in the wrong hands, the responsible party will be fired. Read a little bit about this here.

Some excerpts from the above linked blog here which are relevant:

New product team: a start-up is formed.
Once a new product has been decided on, a team is organised and segregated from the rest of the company by secrecy agreements and sometimes physical barriers. Sections of the building may be locked or cordoned off to make room for the teams working on a sensitive new project. This effectively creates a ‘start-up’ inside the company that is only responsible to the executive team, freeing them from the reporting structure of a big company.

Apple New Product Process (ANPP).
Once the design of the product has begun, the ANPP is put into action. This is a document that sets out every step in the product development process of a product in detail. It’s not an original Apple concept but was first applied at the company during the development of the Macintosh. It maps out the stages of the creation, who is responsible for completion, who will work on each stage and when they will be completed.

Products are reviewed every Monday.
The ET (Executive Team) meets every Monday to go over every product that the company has in process. It is able to accomplish this because Apple has so few products in production at any given time. Any that do not get a review are rolled over to the next review Monday. This means that no product is ever more than two-weeks away from a key decision being made.

The EPM mafia.
Once a product begins production, two responsible people are enlisted to bring it to fruition. The engineering program manager (EPM) and the global supply manager (GSM). The former has absolute control of the product process and is so powerful that it is referred to as the “EPM mafia”. Both of these positions are held by executives that spend most of their time in China overseeing the production process. The supply manager and program manager collaborate, but not without tension, always making decisions based on ‘what is best for the product’.

Once a product is done, it is designed, built and tested again.
At times there are leaks that display versions of a product like the iPhone that we never see released. Many times these leaks come from China, where a factory worker has been paid to hand off a prototype to a blogger or journalist. It turns out that once Apple is done building a product, it redesigns the product and sends it through the manufacturing process again, explaining the various versions we may see leaked. This is a 4-6 week process that ends with a gathering of responsible Apple employees at the factory.

The EPM then takes the beta device back to Cupertino for examination and comments, hopping right back on a plane to China to oversee the next iteration of the product. This means that many versions of any given device have been completed, not just partially prototyped. This is an insanely expensive way of building a new product, but it is the standard at Apple.

The packaging room.
A room in the Marketing building is completely dedicated to device packaging. The security here is matched only by the sections of the building dedicated to new products and to design. At one point before a new iPod was launched there was an employee who spent hours every day for months simply opening the hundreds of box prototypes within in order to experience and refine the unboxing process.

Apple new product launch is controlled by the Rules of the Road.
An action plan for the product launch is generated, called the Rules of the Road. It’s a top secret document that lists every significant milestone of a product’s development up until launch. Each milestone is annotated with a DRI (directly responsible individual) that is in charge of making that item happen. Losing or revealing this document to the wrong people results in an immediate firing, as noted in the document itself.

As you can see from the breakdown, Apple often makes decisions that make the process more expensive and less efficient in order to produce a seriously better product. These are things that shouldn’t pay nearly the dividends they do, but consistently fail to disappoint. Many companies are too complex, or too hidebound in the traditional way of doing things, to take on many, if any, aspects of Apple’s process. Still, there is an alluring simplicity to Apple’s accountability schemes and its devotion to ‘good products first’. And there is, of course, the massive financial success of the company over the past 10 years.

This product development process is just a fraction of the information revealed in Lashinsky’s book, which is available today in a variety of formats. If you’re a student of Apple or of electronics manufacturing at large then it should be added to your reading list post-haste.

Apple picked one thing that they can do that's great. They knew it was Mac.
Tim Cook used to say that Apple could put its entire product line on a conference room table.
Apple is not set up to do twenty amazing things a year. At most it's three projects that can get a ton of attention at the executive level.
In most companies, the executive who runs the commerce website would control the photographic images on the site. Not at Apple, where one graphic arts team chooses images for the entire company.
You're hired and appreciated for your ability on the field, not your ability as a coach or manager.
In companies run by general-management concepts, the creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do. Not at Apple. Apple got rid of 4000 middle-managers.
Clear direction + individual accountability + a sense of urgency + constant feedback + clarity of mission — these attributes will give you a sense of Apple's values
A players hire A players, and B players hire C players.
At Apple, just two engineers wrote the code for converting Apple's Safari browser for the iPad.
There is no other field of human activity — including entertainment, sports, high fashion, or politics — which is so riddled by fads as business. Every day there is a newspaper headline, every week there is a magazine story, and perhaps with the Internet we will soon be saying every hour there is yet another "guru" that touts a new hero of business or a new method of solving problems which date back not merely ten years but far longer. At the least, the study of business history can prompt an executive to ask of each new "solution" to problems that can never be solved but only managed: How really lasting is this approach, this idea, this company?
Mike McCue (Flipboard) overtly thinks about the simplicity of Apple's design and attention to detail. "We are primarily about building a really pure user experience that is heavily thought through," "We will spend hours and hours and hours talking about a 'close' button in the corner of the screen and mocking it up, and going through hundreds of different design iterations on that before we settle on one that we like. That kind of attention to detail means that as a result you really can't do a lot of things. You have to just do a few things really, really well."