How Apple Created The Best Products In The World

Pomp’s notes on Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda

To investors,

I have been reading one book per week this year. This past week’s book was Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During The Golden Age of Steve Jobs written by Ken Kocienda. Highly recommend reading it. If you are interested in the individual highlights that I made in the physical book, you can read those here. Hope you enjoy these notes every Monday morning.

---

Book’s main argument:

Apple is not only one of the most valuable companies in the world, but it is also widely considered one of the most creative and innovative. Ken Kocienda spent approximately 15 years working on numerous Apple products that you use on a daily basis, including the Safari browser and the keyboard on your iPhone or iPad. He uses anecdotes and analysis to unpack what made Apple special.

Ken is refreshingly honest throughout the book - sharing his accomplishments, failures, and the inside baseball of many major product decisions over the years. If you are an entrepreneur or investor, this book will be part inspiration, part education, and part entertainment. There are few companies like Apple, and even fewer leaders like Steve Jobs, so this behind-the-scenes look is worth reading.

5 Big Ideas:

💡 Idea #1 — Steve Jobs was obsessed with creating amazing products that delighted customers. Ken writes:

Although Steve’s opinions and moods could be hard to anticipate, he was utterly predictable when it came to his passion for products. He wanted Apple products to be great, and he insisted on being involved in the process as it went along, to guide the development of the work through his reviews. 

The obsession was not exclusive to building the most innovative technology. Jobs understood that great product teams had to understand humans as much as they understood software. Ken writes:

This was part of Steve’s mission for Apple, the most significant strand of Apple’s product development DNA: to meld technology and the liberal arts, to take the latest software and hardware advances, mix them with elements of design and culture, and produce features and products that people found useful and meaningful in their everyday lives. 

Jobs was fond of telling everyone, both in public and private, that the goal of the company was to build amazing products. Ken highlights this with the following:

Steve set the company’s priorities, and he stressed, in public statements and internal communications, that making great software was a core corporate focus. 

This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives. 

He believed that stripping away nonessential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and easier to use over time. He wanted products and their software to speak for themselves.

💡 Idea #2 — Apple took an iterative development process to building products. They had a culture of demos that were used over and over again across products and timelines. Ken writes:

Demos were fundamental to our work at Apple. We used them to highlight the potential, explore the concepts, show the progress, prompt the discussion, and drive the decisions for making our products. 

Everyone knew these demos were necessary to make decisions, but no one was foolish to believe the demo was the actual product:

Software demos need to be convincing, enough to explore an idea, to communicate a step toward making a product, even though the demo is not the product itself.

Ken coins the phrase “creative selection” as a description for the full lifecycle of a product as it goes through various demos:

I’ve given a name to this continuing progression of demo —> feedback —> next demo: creative selection.

💡 Idea #3 — No matter how good your designers, software developers, and executive team is, you still need hard work for long periods of time to doing something great. Ken writes:

Edison himself described his approach for constructing the foundations for his innovative work: “None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Easy explanations are alluring, and Edison-like inspiration seems magical. Perspiration, we know, involves drudgery. Edison knew the actual story was more about the drudgery.

When these ideas were applied to Apple, they still held true. Ken highlights the fact that everyone at Apple knew the “magic” was really just a lot of trial and error, along with loads of hard work:

Ideas are nothing without the hard work to make them real. 

Hard work is hard. Inspiration does not pay off without diligence. 

Hard work was not reserved only for junior employees either. Steve Jobs may have been the hardest worker in the room. Ken writes:

This was one of Steve’s great secrets of success as a presenter. He practiced. A lot. He went over and over the material until he had the presentation honed, and he knew it cold.

💡 Idea #4 — Apple is known as a design-first company that builds beautiful products. But Apple’s definition of design is not what you would expect. It is not only about how a product looks, but rather “design is how it works.” Ken includes the following quote from Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it [a product] looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

It is nearly impossible to iterate your way to a great design. There is something about human intuition, and the courage to make bold decisions, that creates beautiful products. Ken writes:

Bug squashing might help to make a decent product, but it’s not the secret for making a great one.

A/B tests might be useful in finding a color that will get people to click a link more often, but it can’t produce a product that feels like a pleasing and integrated whole.

Ken points out how different this approach to software development was compared to Apple’s peers:

Google factored out taste from its design process. 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.

💡 Idea #5 — One of Apple’s competitive advantages was their clarity of purpose. Ken writes:

The challenge gave us a purpose.

When describing why Apple was able to avoid many of the common product development traps that other Silicon Valley companies fell victim to, Ken wrote:

If I were to take a stab at explaining the why, I would say that our clarity of purpose kept us on track. Since our focus on making great products never wavered - if for no other reason than that’s what Steve demanded - perhaps concentrating keenly on what to do helped us to block out what not to do.

A clarity of purpose doesn’t mean that you have to know every answer on day one. In fact, Apple started with a big idea and small actions. Ken explains:

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. 

Memorable quotes:

1. If there’s a unique magic in Apple’s products, it’s in the software.

2. Demos served as the primary means to turn ideas into software.

3. Decisiveness was crucial.

4. The biggest lesson I learned as I wrote this book is how a group of people and the culture they create are one and the same.

5. Execution dependent - the quality of the result is mostly the quality of the doing.

6. Working in software meant we could move fast.

7. Glimpses of potential are not the same as a finished product.

8. Popularity doesn’t equal excellence.

9. Empathy is a crucial part of making great products.

10. At Apple, there was never much time to savor success.

Pomp’s Takeaways:

This book pulls back the curtain on one of the most impressive companies over the last 50 years. There are anecdotes about Steve Jobs and various products that humans use on a daily basis.

My first big takeaway was related to Steve Jobs. Many people have read about his charisma, his fanatical focus on great products, and his obsessive leadership style, but to read the anecdotes from an insider hammer home these ideas. The main idea I took away was that a single leader can push an organization to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Steve Jobs was obviously a special person. There are many aspects of his leadership style that each of us can implement into our daily lives though.

My second big takeaway was how small the teams at Apple have been over the years. Ken describes a number of products that he helped build, which would be considered mission critical components of iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and the teams were usually less than 10 people and almost never more than 25 people. This small team size was also connected to the idea that the leadership must be actively involved in building the software to solve problems. There was no delegating to junior engineers or opportunities to play bureaucratic executive. Either you help build products or you are not needed.

My third big takeaway was how much thought and effort went into products we use on a daily basis. I use the Apple keyboard on various devices thousands of times per day. Ken explains in detail how the software team was able to create a product that worked, even though the buttons are small and most typing is littered with inaccuracies. The simple keyboard product is actually quite complex, but the fact that the Apple team figured it out has led to an explosion of productivity for hundreds of millions of people globally. That is insanely cool.

My fourth big takeaway was the lack of brainstorming sessions at Apple. The focus is on demos and working prototypes. Ideas don’t get rewarded unless you can implement them. This made me think about how much wasted time and effort occurs in other large companies (and some startups too!). Good reminder to write software, build products, and stop wasting time.

My fifth big takeaway was more of a personal one — I remember working at Facebook in 2014/2015 and being impressed with the quality of the people I worked with on a daily basis. Every single person was an all-star and we were able to build products that were used by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. Just as A players want to work with A players, I believe that momentum begets momentum. The quality of the team at Apple, along with their ability to constantly execute at a high level, serves as a reminder that many of your company’s problems related to culture, product, and profits may simply be described as “people problems.” Hire great people and you have so much less to worry about.

Lastly, although it was not explicitly stated in the book, I kept thinking about how the stories that Ken told were living proof of Apple’s ability to “think different.” Sometimes marketing messages are mere reflections of a company’s culture. Be a rebel. Be courageous. Be bold. Think different. And go change the world :)

---

As I mentioned, this past week’s book was Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During The Golden Age of Steve Jobs written by Ken Kocienda. Highly recommend reading it. If you are interested in the individual highlights that I made in the physical book, you can read those here. Hope you enjoy these notes every Monday. Feel free to leave a comment - I read all of them.

-Pomp

Note: Make sure you are subscribed to receive these personal notes each Monday morning.