Apple’s secrecy caused engineers to burn out and led to a new approach

Apple’s stealth when it comes to product development is one of the company’s defining characteristics. But Apple’s former human resources chief said it came at a high price: engineer burnout and frustration. Ultimately, he argues, this stifles innovation within the company.

Chris Deever, who was Apple’s Senior Business Partner from 2015 to 2019, says the company experimented with the development of the AirPods Pro to see if it could create a more collaborative work environment while maintaining privacy…

Deaver wrote in an article for Fast Company that he understands Apple’s secrecy motives.

Secrecy is a value she cherished in order to keep “surprise and delight” for clients. The kind that comes on launch day, when no one (not even most employees) anticipates how insanely great new products are going to be.

But he said that he very quickly realized the dark side of different teams working in isolation.

Accumulation of critical information. Promotion of personal plans. Discord. As a new HR business partner, I was often drawn into these escalations. And usually it was about the fact that “this team is not divided.”

He said it was so bad that the engineers didn’t even know who they could and couldn’t talk to about their work.

I heard one new employee after another, brilliant people ask the main question: “How do I work this way? If I can only share information with certain people, how do I know who and when? I don’t want to be fired or put in jail.”

The friction created by these separate bunkers meant that when they eventually came together it was very stressful, even creating enemies among people from different teams.

Teams spent months innovating sparsely, only to finally converge at the eleventh hour before launch, ending up in five or six hour daily meetings, causing enormous friction and burnout. The people were disappointed. They wanted to leave or “never work with that one person again.”

Deaver found that Apple’s operations teams took a different approach, creating a “think tank” that worked across disparate divisions.

We discovered the Camera Brain Trust (as is the case with the iPhone camera or cameras in any hardware devices) or CBT and applied the following key ingredients: weekly transparency sessions between employees, focusing on a vulnerable or open approach to information sharing. the challenges they faced. Each leader and team has a voice, each telling exactly where they have been in their development and what they need from other teams. This led to cycles of innovation that accelerated camera technology to new heights, making it the gold standard for collaboration.

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Unfortunately, no explanation is given as to why film crews were allowed to work more openly. But it set an example for Deaver and others, convincing Apple executives to test the same approach when designing the AirPods Pro.

This was seen as a success, and a somewhat more open approach was adopted across Apple’s other product teams in an initiative known as Others Together.

There has been a cultural shift towards what we have called “Others Together”, the next level vision for the future of Apple. Combining the power of the historical “Think Different” definition, which emphasized the power of an infinite variety of voices, with the power of doing it all “Together”. All this is possible thanks to a better exchange.

Understandably, Deaver doesn’t go into the details of the trade-off between secrecy and collaboration, but it looks like the AirPods Pro have set a precedent for at least a somewhat more open development process.

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