This is from conversations with friends at Apple over the years. Apple employees: please confirm/complicate!
- Secrecy does actually get in the way. It's not great when you aren't aware of large features or products that will impact your work.
- Apple hires people who have great product design instincts, and even end-users know Apple's foundational design principles. However, lack of feedback from end-users does occasionally bite them (see: aborted Safari redesign)
- Apple takes QA very seriously and invests in high quality QA engineers. QA is not just "a step in the process" or a marginalized outsourced group.
- It's a culture of accountability, not committees. Every product and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). When something isn't working out, the first question is "who's the DRI on this?"
- Most of the organization is highly siloed by function. This allows units to focus entirely on their objectives, which can be productive. But it makes cross-functional collaboration rare. In my opinion, this is why certain aspects of Apple's ecosystem feel disjointed, missing, or don't hang together holistically as well as they could.
- Secrecy does actually get in the way. It's not great when you aren't aware of large features or products that will impact your work.
- Apple hires people who have great product design instincts, and even end-users know Apple's foundational design principles. However, lack of feedback from end-users does occasionally bite them (see: aborted Safari redesign)
- Apple takes QA very seriously and invests in high quality QA engineers. QA is not just "a step in the process" or a marginalized outsourced group.
- It's a culture of accountability, not committees. Every product and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). When something isn't working out, the first question is "who's the DRI on this?"
- Most of the organization is highly siloed by function. This allows units to focus entirely on their objectives, which can be productive. But it makes cross-functional collaboration rare. In my opinion, this is why certain aspects of Apple's ecosystem feel disjointed, missing, or don't hang together holistically as well as they could.