Apple, Inc. - Development Without Compromise

The notion that Steve Jobs personally chooses what new products to create at Apple is fallacious. New products kickoffs at Apple are driven by three publicly invisible forces: the marketing team, the design team, and upper management. Yet every decision that gets made at Apple is done in the style of Steve Jobs – with little to no compromise. This pursuit of perfection manifests itself both in the coherent alignment of its product offerings and the quality of execution. The resulting, uncompromising products are central to Apple’s branding and its differentiation from competitors.

In order to understand why Apple eliminates compromise from its development process, Apple designers will relay “The Parable of the Concept Car.” Steve himself told it thusly to TIME magazine:

"You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened?... What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, 'Nah, we can't do that. That's impossible.' And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, 'We can't build that!' And it gets a lot worse."

In most companies a new product will suffer feature-massaging marketing teams, cost-cutting operations teams, technically challenged engineering teams, and risk averse managerial teams. When there is little alignment between stakeholders, and when every step of the development cycle brings about new compromises, the product that emerges from development is often a bastardized shadow of the original, innovative concept. Apple turns this model of development on its head.

Apple’s product development is internally understood to be nearly dictatorial in nature. Once a design has been chosen by the design team, marketing team, and the CEO, it becomes the responsibility of the rest of the company to make that vision a reality. The engineering teams know that they can’t push back on the industrial design team unless a product is truly impossible to build. This is difficult to understate, as this unwillingness to compromise the design vision is hardly hyperbolic.

When Apple rolled out laptops with cameras built into the screen bezels, the design team placed a small LED next to it to indicate when the camera was turned on. Yet the hole it left in the aluminum bothered design lead Jonathan Ive. Ive wondered why the hole always needed to be there if the light was only on occasionally – shouldn’t the light and its hole both disappear when not in use? Ive launched an internal R&D project to develop “transparent aluminum” that would allow light to pass through solid metal, eliminating the need for an unsightly hole.

It took 8 months and millions of dollars to bend the laws of physics to the design team’s will. It was discovered that perforating the metal with dozens of exceptionally tiny holes allowed light to pass through while the holes themselves remained undetectable to the naked eye when unilluminated. The capital equipment required to implement this new technology in mass production cost tens of millions of dollars and radical improvements in quality control.

Spending millions to eliminate an insignificant hole for cosmetic purposes is, by most standards, a foolish decision. Yet this unflinching pursuit of the ideal is fundamentally tied to Apple’s brand, generating coherent and well integrated products that generate nearly fanatical responses from its customer base. No other consumer electronics company will go to such extreme lengths to ensure it releases quality products. The result is a subtle but nearly unassailable differentiation between Apple and its competitors.

The lessons learned from Apple’s unflinching design process seem difficult to apply broadly as most companies can’t afford to spend millions of dollars tweaking subtle details in their products. Yet the actual details of execution are less important than taking a singular, coherent approach to development. Apple sets goals it knows it can achieve and then executes without deviating from the plan, even when it greatly complicates the development process. Every employee at Apple knows their objective is to make damned sure that the product that is released is identical to the product that was conceived.

Product development and management teams must learn to set lofty, appropriate goals that are coherent with the company mission. Then, once the objectives are set, the resulting products must be developed without compromising their integrity. This singularity of purpose generates products that are on-brand, consistent across product lines, and set apart from competitors whose offerings are the results of systemic compromise.