How does Apple create such amazing products?
.
“Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups— design, manufacturing, engineering, sales— meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives… it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain.”
Via Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation:
The designers come up with a basic look and feature set and then pass it on to the engineers, who figure out how to actually make it work. And then it gets passed along to the manufacturing folks, who figure out how to build it in large numbers— after which it gets sent to the marketing and sales people, who figure out how to persuade people to buy it. This model is so ubiquitous because it performs well in situations where efficiency is key, but it tends to have disastrous effects on creativity, because the original idea gets chipped away at each step in the chain. The engineering team takes a look at the original design and says, “Well, we can’t really do that— but we can do 80 percent of what you want.” And then the manufacturing team says, “Sure, we can do some of that.” In the end, the original design has been watered down beyond recognition.
Apple’s approach, by contrast, is messier and more chaotic at the beginning, but it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain. Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups— design, manufacturing, engineering, sales— meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles— and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.
Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
Related posts:
Is Apple a company or a religion?
