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FWIW, I don't think this is the case at Apple. I sit in with the product manager as they get grilled by VPs and SVPs. They get damned hard questions - mainly th

FWIW, I don't think this is the case at Apple. I sit in with the product manager as they get grilled by VPs and SVPs. They get damned hard questions - mainly the short ones ("why", "what if" and "how", and to a lesser extent "when" and who") and part of my job there is to provide data for their cover. I've given demos to SVPs before, and it's not a pleasant experience, I'm very happy to leave it to the PM. Sometimes my job is to gently point out to an SVP that his/her assumptions are wrong, but most of the time I stay out of the way. The PM puts together the slide-deck (usually with help from engineering management) and the PM presents it, though (s)he can call on others for expertise for specific sections. PM's have to be very good at defending the direction they want to take the company in, and the top brass are scarily good at coming up with the hard questions, even when those questions are very domain-specific. In any event, (S)VPs at Apple are very invested in what the company does, when it will happen, what the consequences are, and why we're doing X. Directors and Managers are the ones responsible for execution, and the concept of a DRI is very very important in Apple culture.

potatolicious 4y ago
Fully agreed re: Apple from first-hand knowledge, and IMO this is a large part of the company's "secret sauce". Which is both a high compliment to Apple and a damning indictment of other companies like Google: the secret sauce is having your senior leadership and executives live and breathe product! Huh. It seems like an obvious observation, but clearly not obvious enough because most large tech cos do not do this! Your senior leadership should have encyclopedic knowledge about the product and its roadmap. They should be able to describe, in detail, the major features that will be shipping and why the company is pursuing them. They should also relentlessly question product proposals because most product proposals are absolutely not good enough at inception to be worth building, and refuse to greenlight projects until they pass muster. This is how you ship good products in big companies. [edit] Another salient point worth bringing up: there is a deeply-held belief at Google (and from what I hear, also at FB) that product viability cannot be tested except with the public via rigorous A/B testing. The result of this poorly substantiated belief is that trying new ideas requires building out (at minimum) a full MVP. The execution costs for trying new ideas is extraordinarily high, and more than that requires commitments to the public. This is distinctly unlike more functional product orgs where ideas can be validated in a number of ways short of building the actual thing (user research, focus groups, simplified prototypes tested with selected members of the public under observation, etc.) and are much faster and much cheaper. You can get a lot of understanding of what products and features work without committing to a full buildout.
- antipaul 4y ago
  Yep: Ken Kocienda, in "Creative Selection", his book about Apple's design process, makes fun of how the "others" ran 100s of A/B tests to determine the shade of blue for some interface, and other such metrics obsessions. Apple's different philosophy is admirable: hire people with "taste". As Fred Brooks said, "great design comes from great designers" (though by "design" he meant "engineering" but still) [1] [1] See PDF: http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf
antipaul 4y ago
If readers want to learn more, see: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio... What I wonder: is this "experts leading experts" philosophy unique to Apple?

potatolicious 4y ago

Fully agreed re: Apple from first-hand knowledge, and IMO this is a large part of the company's "secret sauce". Which is both a high compliment to Apple and a damning indictment of other companies like Google: the secret sauce is having your senior leadership and executives live and breathe product! Huh. It seems like an obvious observation, but clearly not obvious enough because most large tech cos do not do this! Your senior leadership should have encyclopedic knowledge about the product and its roadmap. They should be able to describe, in detail, the major features that will be shipping and why the company is pursuing them. They should also relentlessly question product proposals because most product proposals are absolutely not good enough at inception to be worth building, and refuse to greenlight projects until they pass muster. This is how you ship good products in big companies. [edit] Another salient point worth bringing up: there is a deeply-held belief at Google (and from what I hear, also at FB) that product viability cannot be tested except with the public via rigorous A/B testing. The result of this poorly substantiated belief is that trying new ideas requires building out (at minimum) a full MVP. The execution costs for trying new ideas is extraordinarily high, and more than that requires commitments to the public. This is distinctly unlike more functional product orgs where ideas can be validated in a number of ways short of building the actual thing (user research, focus groups, simplified prototypes tested with selected members of the public under observation, etc.) and are much faster and much cheaper. You can get a lot of understanding of what products and features work without committing to a full buildout.

antipaul 4y ago
Yep: Ken Kocienda, in "Creative Selection", his book about Apple's design process, makes fun of how the "others" ran 100s of A/B tests to determine the shade of blue for some interface, and other such metrics obsessions. Apple's different philosophy is admirable: hire people with "taste". As Fred Brooks said, "great design comes from great designers" (though by "design" he meant "engineering" but still) [1] [1] See PDF: http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

antipaul 4y ago

If readers want to learn more, see: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio... What I wonder: is this "experts leading experts" philosophy unique to Apple?