This is how Apple’s top secret product development
process works
Many aspects of Apple’s product development process
have long been shrouded in mystery. The process is discussed in a new book Inside
Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works, by
Adam Lashinsky,
which is out now. The book talks about a variety of different aspects of Apple
as a company; its philosophy, its hiring
process and its legendary secrecy.
But Apple’s product process has held a strong
fascination for many over the years as it defies long-held conventions about how it
should work for companies as large as it is. While some of these points have
been revealed before, there is much here that is new to me. Lashinsky’s compact
tome, which is fantastic, goes into detail on every aspect of the process and
is well worth a read.
This is the framework on which
every Apple product development is hung:
Every
product at Apple starts with design. Designers are treated
like royalty at Apple, where the entire product conforms to their vision. This
the polar opposite of the way it works at other companies. Instead of the
design being beholden to the manufacturing, finance or manufacturing
departments, these all conform to the will of the design department headed by
Jony Ive.
Designers at Apple have literally
no contact with the finance departments at all and are considered to be
unlimited in terms of the costs or manufacturing practicality of the
materials used. The Industrial Design studio is the womb of all Apple
products. It is where they are first generated and it is only accessible to a
small number of Apple employees including Jonathan Ive.
A
start-up is formed. Once a new product has been decided
on, a team is organized 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 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.
The 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.
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