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

by Ken Kocienda

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.

Summary of the creative selection process

It’s also highly execution dependent, as they say in Hollywood, meaning that the quality of the result is mostly in the quality of the doing.

Even so, that first iPhone had some glaring software gaps that seem remarkable now, and among them was a lack of cut, copy, and paste. It’s hard to believe that the iPhone was out in the world for nearly two full years without a basic feature that had shipped with the first Mac in 1984.

Importance of not waiting to release the perfect product

Get busy. Decide what it means to do great work, and then try to make it happen. Success is never assured, and the effort might not be easy, but if you love what you’re doing, it won’t seem so hard.