Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

by Ken Kocienda

So, here’s my take on the Apple Way, our recipe for making software for products like Safari, WebKit, iPhone, and iPad, my explanation for how we made great products: A small group of people built a work culture based on applying the seven essential elements through an ongoing process of creative selection. Expanded out, it reads like this: A small group of passionate, talented, imaginative, ingenious, ever-curious people built a work culture based on applying their inspiration and collaboration with diligence, craft, decisiveness, taste, and empathy and, through a lengthy progression of demo-feedback sessions, repeatedly tuned and optimized heuristics and algorithms, persisted through doubts and setbacks, selected the most promising bits of progress at every step, all with the goal of creating the best products possible.