Developing an Apple product typically takes years, indeed Apple Glasses are said to have been in the company’s labs and diaries since 2015. That’s why the time to show a prototype to senior management he company is crucial for all developers and engineers involved, a moment of moving forward with this product, radically changing it, or throwing it away like a used handkerchief.
And it is today, along with Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple executive staff we know. But there was a time that Apple veterans remember as the trickiest: the days when Steve Jobs had to demonstrate the products.
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People say Steve Jobs was a product genius. Some insist that he was also our iPhone “product manager”. Let’s take a look at this. How did he work?
—Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) May 28, 2022
Ken Kocienda, a former Apple veteran who worked on iPhone software, among other things, remembers in a Twitter feed what the product development process was like with Jobs at the helm. And Jobs wanted the maintainers to risk everything on the demo board, he didn’t want to know anything about the blueprints, slides, or development explanations. He wanted to see how this product would work in the hands of customers. Place.
The demoOf course, it had to be perfect. If Jobs felt that “insignificant” points of the product were being taught, he immediately claimed he was wasting his time. The result was a speech in which things could go “for the worse”. But if the demo he was right and the right thing was considered, then Jobs was defeated with his impressions and advice on how to improve it.
Kocienda also comments that although some of these meetings were very difficult, the moral was that you learned to manage your colleagues’ time very well. focus on what was really worth it. “We went straight to the problems that needed to be solved and the products that we needed to make.”
I’m not saying prototyping meetings with Tim Cook are a bed of roses, I’m sure that must give a lot of engineers a cold sweat too. But the operating mode Jobs, for many a former Apple employee, is not forgotten.
