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.
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]
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.