Always Day One by Alex Kantrowitz

Author:Alex Kantrowitz [Kantrowitz, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Silos and Secrecy

Apple’s product development itself takes place in extreme secrecy, and even the company’s own employees are largely kept in the dark. The secrecy is meant to encourage focus, supporting the company’s pursuit of excellence, and also to limit leaks.

When an Apple employee wants to speak with colleagues about a project they’re working on, they must be “disclosed,” or given the official go-ahead to discuss it, and their colleagues must be disclosed too. Outside of mutual disclosure situations, Apple employees are prohibited from speaking with anyone about their projects, including their coworkers, friends, and spouses.

“I couldn’t talk to people on my team who needed to be doing work about the work they needed to be doing,” Marc Minor, a former Apple marketing employee, told me. “I couldn’t use the names of products, I couldn’t use code names. You can’t use the code name with someone unless they know the code name.”

The disclosure system helps minimize distractions, freeing people up to obsess about their product’s tiniest details. “It becomes much more explicit and clear what you as an individual should be focused on because you don’t even know the other stuff,” one former Apple engineer told me. “At Google, there can be a bit of a sense that everyone is responsible for everything and everyone knows everything else that’s going on, and everyone’s dog-fooding [internally testing] everything, and everyone’s giving feedback about everything they’re dog-fooding, and it results in there being less individual ownership. Whereas at Apple you only know about this one thing—and that’s the one thing you have to do.”

Or, as Goldstein described it: “They’re siloed so that experts can be experts.”

In addition to increasing focus, Apple’s secrecy helps it surprise customers when releasing new products. The element of surprise hooks media and Apple enthusiasts’ attention twice per year: once for new iPhone model introductions, and again for the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, also known as WWDC, which focuses on how developers can build on top of Apple’s operating systems.

About a week before these events, Apple’s marketing and communication teams go into a “black site,” a dedicated building with blacked-out windows set aside to review and translate the new products’ marketing materials. Inside, they get the materials ready for wherever they may appear, be it physical stores, billboards, or online. And then it’s showtime. “It all happens in a little building in Cupertino where everyone gets locked up and they do amazing work,” Minor told me, adding that he ultimately finds the secrecy worthwhile. “There’s something to be said for their ability to control the message,” he said. “As a marketing person, controlling the message is everything.”

If Apple employees leak news of new products, or even show previews of those already announced, they are fired. When Brooke Amelia Peterson went to visit her father, hardware engineer Ken Bauer, at Apple’s campus, she posted a video on YouTube that included footage of Bauer’s announced but not yet released iPhone X. It was a costly mistake.

Peterson is always carrying her camera, Bauer told me.

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