Creative Selection (2018)

Side-Notes

Demos

“At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any A/ B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste—and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception—and we moved on.”

“We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the vision. Round after round of creative selection moved us step by step from the spark of an idea to a finished product.”

Purposes of demos are:

1. Start approximating your end goal as quick as possible
2. Demos “advance the story”
3. Demos "make us react”
4. Allow the creator to gauge people’s genuine reaction to using the product.
5. The catalyst for creative decisions
6. Demos ‘makes discussion of things that are complicated easy. They make it easier to make decisions’

Focus on the highest risk assumption

Ex: At one point in the development of iOS — it became clear that the keyboard wasn’t working. The head of the project stopped ALL product development and focussed everyone on the keyboard — without which iOS would have been doomed.

Small Team

• The team that originally built Safari for Mac was three people
• Up until late 2005, the team working on project “Purple” that would later be called iOS was less than 25 people.
• Famously Whatsapp has less than 50 engineers when they were acquired by Facebook. Big things can be done by small teams of high calibre, passionate people.