So it occurred to me the other day as I was chatting to a former colleague what it is that makes Apple good at delivering products that your average consumer goes gaga over, makes the average bogan rush out and spend their baby bonus. The answer is simple.
Their Product Managers say no.
Admittedly it sounds simple. What? The key to their success is the ability to say no? Yup, that is it. They pick core features that they believe the customers will use and don't include all the extra stuff that I crave as an Engineer. Everybody thought they were stupid for releasing a new mobile phone with a camera that didn't support MMS.
How many MMS messages have you actually sent in your lifetime? I remember getting my first MMS enabled phone and sending a couple to friends, of course none of my friends could view them, or if they could they didn't look that good anyway. Every phone seemed to send them in a format that every other phone couldn't read. Overall I probably sent say 10 I would say.
What did the iPhone give you?
An easy way to email photos to people, or through the App store an easy way for you to upload it to FaceSpace or Twitter, or send it via IM. All of which worked better than MMS anyway, because there weren't compatibility issues.
Apple was widely criticised by the geekish elite, by every tech blogger from hear to the moon, except for the odd Apple Fan Boi everyone thought their shiney new phone wouldn't sell well because it offered limited features. But the vast majority of people, the people that Apple sell most of their products to don't care if you can't MMS, or can't transfer files via Blue tooth.
They want a phone they can use!
Initially they bought because it was a well designed phone that made the core functionality intuitive to use. Then more people bought it because you could add games easily, you could have fun with it and it was still easy to use.
So, what does this have to do with the Product Managers saying no? They stopped scope creep. Every Engineer that I can think of loves to add features, countless times I've heard
"Wouldn't it be cool if......"
in a lunch room or a project meeting. We all want to add features, I know I am guilty of it. In fact we wouldn't really be doing our job properly if we weren't thinking of what cool features we could out to what ever product we are working on at the time. I am certain that this also happens in the lunch rooms at Cupertino. The difference is that the Product Mangers don't allow the scope to creep, they also don't allow a partially completed feature in, think about Multitasking for a second.
When the iPhone was initially released there was a very clear statement that multitasking would not be allowed because it impacted battery life and performance too much. This indicates that multitasking was planned and even had been implemented and tested at least at the prototype stage. Clearly the Product Managers and Engineers weren't happy with it's performance and decided not to ship it initially. I'm willing to bet that there has been a team working on multitasking and getting it efficient and intuitve since the inception of the iPhone project and until the 3GS came out and iPhone OS4 allowed sufficient performance there was no mention of it.
Because the Product Managers said no.
Of course I am also willing to admit that there is a possibility that it is just Steve that has the power of veto, but there is still someone within the organisation that is saying it and that is the key.
No comments:
Post a Comment