After Steve
I recently finished the book After Steve, by Tripp Mickle. Briefly told, the book follows Job’s left- and right hands, Tim Cook and Jony Ive in alternating chapters through their time before Apple, their collaboration with Steve Jobs and how each found their path after his death: Stoic operations expert Tim Cook continuing to do what he does best, leading Apple to greater-than-ever financial heights, and Job’s other lieutenant, Jony Ive who, through a combination of grief, getting burned-out, and sidelined lost his touch and left Apple.
The book also talks of a company that has forgotten how to innovate. Its subtitle leaves little to the imagination: “How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul”. I’m not sure I agree with that premise, but I’ll get back to that later. Still, I enjoyed reading the book and if you have an interest in Apple I think you’ll find it interesting too, despite its flaws.
More than reading about the specific people involved, I’m always interested in reading about how some of my favourite products came to be. Because of my background at Sketch, I often think about ‘Product’, as a role within a team, and where it sits between Technology and Design; someone who is the decision maker who sits on the crossroad of what is possible, vs what is desirable, and what is achievable in the time constraints we have. That is what I call the ‘Product’ role at a company – a role distinct from Design, and it’s the lens through which I read this book.
A Product role executed well lets each part shine; Engineering, Marketing and Design come together to build a great product. Like here, with the iPod:
To run the project, Jobs hired Tony Fadell, a hardware engineer who had worked on General Magic's personal digital assistant. Rubinstein and Fadell assembled the components, while Apple's head of marketing, Phil Schiller, contributed the idea of creating a wheel to scroll through songs, a concept inspired by a Bang & Olufsen phone. They handed the ingredients to Ive to package.
That last sentence sounds ominous though. And indeed, a little later:
Despite the triumph, Ive was disappointed. His design team had been less central to the product's development than it had been to the iMac. He wanted a bigger voice in conceptualizing what Apple made.
Indeed, to do design well, designers shouldn’t come in at the end and be given a box while being told to “make it look good”. The idea of the click wheel, a singularly great way to browse through a collection of a 1000 songs, that is great Design. It’s not how it looks, it’s how it works, to quote another cliché. While the result was arguably great, we can also understand Ive’s dissatisfaction here.
With the development of the iPhone, it seems that everything came together beautifully. Design had a big hand in shaping the final look and feel of the phone, and was instrumental in some of its core technologies. At the same time, the software and hardware marched ahead at lightning speed and the entire project was guided by clear purpose and direction – it’s a story of absolute triumph.
Things can also tilt in the other extreme, where Design, unchecked by reality, takes off into the stratosphere, conceptualising products that cannot be built – the software-complexities of the Car project in this case seemingly waved aside:
Outside, an actor performed as Siri and read from a script that had been written for the fanciful demonstration. As the imaginary car sped forward, Ive pretended to peer out its window.
"Hey, Siri, what was that restaurant we just passed?' he asked.
The actor outside responded. A few other exchanges with the executives followed.
Afterward, Ive exited the car with a look of satisfaction upon his face as if the future was even grander than he'd imagined. He seemed oblivious to the engineers looking on, some of whom were gripped by a worried feeling that the project was as fictional as the demonstration, moving fast but nowhere near its final destination.
Software is hard – and very different from hardware! The best products are built when the impossible is just far enough ahead to be within grasp of what’s possible – like with the iPhone, and seemingly unlike the Car project. It’s when design and engineering come together, guided by a combination of teamwork, taste, realism and ambition. This is to me where a Product person should sit, which Steve Jobs at Apple did singularly well, and which for Apple, after his death, is a void impossible to fill.
After Jobs’s death, we read about Design becoming more insular, of Operations-minded people filling up the Board, and of a slowly developing gulf between Design and Operations. As an example, one did not talk about the cost of things in the design studio – an understandable encouragement to think freely and come up with revolutionary new ideas. Yet, in the end, products need to be created for a price a consumer is willing to part with, and the inevitable clashes began:
More and more engineers and operations staff filtered into the studio to manage all the elements of the watch and a push by Apple's product marketing arm to diversify the iPhone with a lower-priced model in five colors. The newcomers brought Cook's back-office concerns about operations and costs into the sacrosanct studio. Ive's unwritten rules began to be broken.
The frustrations on either end are understandable. The balancing Product person chief was missing, leaving one side unchecked and the other out of the loop. Now that Ive has left Apple, Design reports to Jeff Williams. It seems that the pendulum has swung back. The book finishes with this ominous paragraph:
Late that afternoon, after the stock market closed, Apple issued a press release announcing Ive's departure. The release outlined a new reporting structure. After fifteen years of reporting directly to the CEO, Ive's old design team – the group of aesthetes once thought of as gods inside Apple – would report to Apple's chief operating officer, Jeff Williams, a mechanical engineer with an MBA.
It does not leave the reader with a great feeling: a company whose great innovations are behind it, a shackled design team and a CEO who’s content to coast on service revenues. I don’t share that pessimism though. The recent technical innovations around the M1 chips, and the great hardware designs around it have left me more excited than ever in fact.
And what’s more, I don’t think Design should reign supreme. It is tremendously important, of course, but there needs to be a balance between things. For all the brilliance of the two men, Cook and Ive, they needed an editor, a Product Director. If anything is missing on Apple’s leadership page, it may be that role. It may just be that those shoes are too big to ever fill.