Product manager apple free#

They may disagree at points but their guiding principle is to act in the interests of the product at all times. The EPM Mafia may sound scary (and they probably are to the suppliers) but their real job is simply to ensure that products are delivered to market in the right way, at the right time and at the right cost. There is a significant market advantage to this approach and its one that many other electronics manufacturers are emulating now. This removes much of the headache of manufacturing for Apple whilst keeping production costs as low as possible. Instead it relies on contract outsourcing companies like Foxconn (one of the largest employers in the world) to do this for them. It’s their job to take over when a product moves from design to production.Īs you might expect, these people are usually going to be found in China, Apple does very little of its own manufacturing. Together they are known within Apple as the “EPM Mafia”. The EPM is the engineering program manager and the GSM is the global supply manager. This keeps delays in decision making to a minimum and enables the company to be very lean with its approach to design. In practice, this should mean that every single Apple product is inspected by the executive team at least once a fortnight. If a product cannot be reviewed at one meeting – it’s automatically at the top of the agenda for the next meeting. Instead, resources are concentrated on a handful of projects that are expected to bear fruit rather than being diluted over many lesser projects. This isn’t as daunting as it may sound one of the keys to Apple’s success is that they don’t work on hundreds of new products at once. The Apple Executive Team holds a regular Monday meeting to examine every single product that the company has in design phase at that point in time. The idea is to define what stages the product creation team will go through, who will be responsible for delivering the final product, who works on which stage and where they work and also when the product is expected to be completed. It details every stage of the design process and it goes into elaborate detail. The Apple New Product Process (ANPP) information is given to a product development team when they begin work. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.5 A Documented Development ProcessĪuthor/Copyright holder: Ed Uthman.

Product manager apple free#

This leaves them free to focus on design rather than day-to-day minutiae. They create their own reporting structures and report directly to the executive team. The team is also removed from the traditional Apple hierarchy at this point. They may even implement physical controls to prevent the team from interacting with other Apple employees during the day. When a design team works on a new product they are then cut off from the rest of the Apple business.

Design Teams are Separated From the Larger Company It’s a simple concept that allows for the creation of incredible products. They are given free rein to set their own budgets and are given the ability to ignore manufacturing practicalities.Īt the heart of the design department is the Industrial Design Studio where only a select few Apple employees have access. Jony Ive, the British designer who was the Chief Design Officer (CDO) at Apple, and his design team do not report to finance, manufacturing, etc. How do you give designers the freedom to design and ensure that the products they produce fulfil their visions? Well at Apple they put design at the forefront. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 Apple’s Product Development Process Design is at the ForefrontĪuthor/Copyright holder: GiuliaPiccoliTrapletti. And in this article, we’ve distilled the key takeaways from the book. While there are still aspects of the way that Apple works that are shrouded in secrecy, you can get a good idea of the overall high level process through this book. However, Adam Lashinsky, the author of Inside Apple: How America’s most Admired and Secretive Company Really Works has been given a look at the process. This isn’t surprising when a business’s market advantage is its design approach. In Steve Jobs’ time at the company it would have been near impossible to find out about the internal workings of the business. With a valuation that exceeds $2 trillion, there’s a lot that designers can learn from Apple and introduce into their own design environments.Īpple is a notoriously secretive business.

Apple’s Product Development Process may be one of the most successful design processes ever implemented.