How does Apple achieve both secrecy and quality for a release?

This is from conversations with friends at Apple over the years. Apple employees: please confirm/complicate!

– Secrecy does actually get in the way. It’s not great when you aren’t aware of large features or products that will impact your work.

– Apple hires people who have great product design instincts, and even end-users know Apple’s foundational design principles. However, lack of feedback from end-users does occasionally bite them (see: aborted Safari redesign)

– Apple takes QA very seriously and invests in high quality QA engineers. QA is not just “a step in the process” or a marginalized outsourced group.

– It’s a culture of accountability, not committees. Every product and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). When something isn’t working out, the first question is “who’s the DRI on this?”

– Most of the organization is highly siloed by function. This allows units to focus entirely on their objectives, which can be productive. But it makes cross-functional collaboration rare. In my opinion, this is why certain aspects of Apple’s ecosystem feel disjointed, missing, or don’t hang together holistically as well as they could.

> It’s a culture of accountability, not committees. Every product and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). When something isn’t working out, the first question is “who’s the DRI on this?”

This seems to be in contrast to the tenet of blameless postmortems [1] adopted at Google et al. Does this culture lead to blaming said responsible individual, or is the feedback seen as constructive?

> When something isn’t working out, the first question is “who’s the DRI on this?”

Wow. Every company in SF Bay area I worked at stressed that they don’t look for who’s to blame, but on how to solve the issue.

If you want to solve an issue, it makes sense to reach out to the person who is responsible for the domain the issue is in. Nothing in the sentence you quoted implied any amount of blame.

I think there is a clear difference between being responsible for something, and being blamed for something. There may also be overlap. My experience has been the anti blame culture (which is a good thing) has been twisted into a lack of ownership and responsibility in some orgs (which is a bad thing).

The intent is not (or shouldn’t be) to find a scapegoat—it’s so others know WHO exactly is going to help resolve the issue.

That said, from what I’ve heard, culture at Apple varies heavily by group and manager. There are plenty of horror stories!

It is relatively simple: strong Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).

One of my previous employers worked with Apple a couple of years ago to ensure the stability and security of Apple Arcade, and every employee, even the janitor, needed to sign an extensive NDA to ensure the secrecy of the project.

We kept “the secret” for six (6) months or so, and at one point we almost lose the contract because someone mentioned the project’s name during a phone call, at home, while a family member was listening, and that person told someone else, and that someone apparently talked about it somewhere and Apple found out.

Fortunately, the CEO managed to, somehow, keep the contract.

Even inside Apple, they have to sign NDAs when you need to talk with a different team about a new product, project, feature, etc. I asked about it during recent interviews (January 2022) to join a team that is supposed to have massive cross-team work with the entire engineering organization.

Rather than this being a special quality of Apple, I think the marketing strategy of a lot of other B2C brands has now involved “””leaks””” to enthusiast circles for a long time, probably since “””evangelists””” and “””influencers””” became subjects of pop consumer culture — so I think that Apple leaking not less but the others just leaking intentionally more info ahead of release to fuel the hype is an important factor at play here.

I don’t wish to comment on the “and quality” part in your question though.

I think part of it is that, sure, leaked iPhone spec’s will always get some attention, but it’s nowhere near as big a deal as the first few iPhones or other new product launches. News of the next minor evolution of iPhone spec’s probably aren’t profitable enough to devote resources to fretting them out. I think we’re past the point where (for established products) it’s as big a deal as when Gizmodo got a hold of a pre release.

Apple is the biggest company on earth and out of the FAANG companies, they are the most prestigious place to work. Their market cap is on it’s way to 10 Trillion. There’s very little incentive for people to jeopardize this job and give up their stock in the company.

I don’t know why you are downvoted. I agreed, personal experience says that Apple is not a great place to work at for PMs. I am curious to hear other folks chime in to round out the discussion.

Interests align – those who keep the secrets are better off for keeping them (not just for punishment of breaking NDAs, but the fruits (pun intended) of revealing something wonderful).

My (opinionated) take on how this is possible:

– Apple has practically unlimited money

– The company can afford the best of the planet’s talent

– The companies business is ethical and therefore the top layer of talent hesitant to join ad-based companies pick Apple naturally

– The company is highly design driven, which means it’s the perfectionists making most decisions (roughly speaking)

All this seems to have a cultural impact that optimizes for quality without much a/b testing.

They also do not invest in their workforce the way other Bay Area companies do. For example, they do not really encourage engineers to grow outside hired abilities and make it almost impossible to find time to work on anything except the Radars (tasks) put in front of you. Plenty of managers would proudly say out-loud they would prefer someone go build a new skillset outside of Apple and then come back. (This is jokingly referred to as your “next tour of duty” as many engineers actually do come back.)

They also make it challenging to switch teams internally, you basically compete for the same role an external candidate would, and you interview as if you were an external candidate.

All of that makes it very easy to get burnt out and so either you are someone bought into the “cult” of Apple and couldn’t see yourself working anywhere else, or you peace-out once the rose-colored glasses come off.

I Lolled.

Highly ethical ? They’re China’s lapdogs (Google left China). Also they’re the ones who don’t want to pay employees for the time they spend being searched, nor acknowledge when their platform or their customers have a virus.

Design-driven ? They’re the ones with keyboards with a 30% failure rate and $500 repair cost. (They’re PR and financials driven).

They certainly have unlimited money, and have shown they’re not afraid to sue, and bully, or reward compliance.

They market ethics, and like most things they market, the claims are often misleading or exaggerated.

That said, of the companies who market their ethics, Apple seems to actually _do_ more than most.

Apple has extensive indoor private test facilities. Like strip malls, but each shop is a testing ground. Imagine being paid to go hang out at the mall all day. Yea you’ll sign an NDA for that.

In addition to the NDAs, Apple tracks employee data very closely (e.g. iCloud) to mitigate leaks.

The major downside to this approach is the sample size cannot be “internet scale” and it will be biased towards what Apple thinks it knows. That’s why things like Apple Maps and Siri had such poor roll-outs.

Microsoft does not have this culture of secrecy but makes it practically impossible to report issues. I don’t see why Apple would do worse than them.