Apple’s Intersection of Design and Operations

Over the weekend a hard-hitting piece on Apple and some of the frustrations from Jony Ive was published in the Wall St. Journal. I’m sure many of you have read it by now, but in case you haven’t, I encourage you to read it. This article contains a great deal of ammo for Apple’s favorite critics. From the comments from the peanut gallery, mostly on Twitter, you would be led to believe that Apple won’t design another great product ever again. Everyone seems to be honing in on the most popular criticism about Apple’s management to date, which is that they are increasingly focusing more on operations than product design.

This criticism, while somewhat accurate since Apple has needed world-class operational focus in order to scale to meet the demand for their products, misses the point when distilled to a statement that their only focus is operations.

Design Friction
Talk to anyone who has ever designed a piece of hardware, and you will hear them lament about the trade-offs they had to make so that their wonderful creation could exist. Within hardware design, there are two truths, the hardware is hard, and designing something that can be mass manufactured with traditional tools is even harder. I’ve worked with plenty of hardware startups who bring brilliant creatives into the design process only to have those some creatives frustrated because their design vision could not be manufactured at scale.

Through Apple’s manufacturing history, I had heard stories of Apple’s execs, and even Jony, going to China and collaborating with companies like Foxconn in order to help them troubleshoot some manufacturing processes they were having trouble mass producing related to design textures, or other facets of making Apple products. I’ve similarly heard from manufacturing companies that no other company than Apple brings them more complex design challenges they have to solve to mass produce things Apple creates. There is a fine balance between design and scaling manufacturing, and I can imagine, at times, that process can be frustrating for creative visionaries like Jony Ive.

Fusing Design and Operations
Ive has had to operate in this world for a long time and was fully aware of the challenge. In fact, I’m certain he himself considered this a challenge. It’s hard to argue that when it comes to overall aesthetics, material design, colors, textures, etc., that Apple sets the bar but what gets underappreciated is how unprecedented their scale is with such complex designs. Jony Ive conquered the realm of creating incredible designs that can be mass manufactured, but he again would fully understand the tradeoffs. Having conquered this challenge, I am not surprised he is interested in a new challenge.

The Apple which has emerged, is one that is now blending design and operations in a way no other company is. It’s easy to look from the outside and say they are purely operations, but that does not give enough credit to the process that even Apple’s top management is not also deeply interested in the product parts of the business as well.

Many of Apple’s critics are purely nostalgic. Wanting Apple to go back to the days when some of the designs were more bold, iconic, possibly polarizing, but in that time Apple was selling tens of millions of products not hundreds of millions of products. This is a crucially important point that many in the public sphere miss.

For Apple to continue on their path as one of the biggest companies in the world, and one of the biggest hardware-centric companies in the world, they will need to keep blazing trails down this fusion of operations and design. As I wrote in my article on Friday, some of Apple’s most interesting designs are still ahead of them as the bar to compete with technology we wear will be on a vastly different plane than that of things that sit on our desks or in our pockets and bags. That challenge is now mostly in the hands of the team Jony built and groomed for such a task.

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Ben Bajarin

Ben Bajarin is a Principal Analyst and the head of primary research at Creative Strategies, Inc - An industry analysis, market intelligence and research firm located in Silicon Valley. His primary focus is consumer technology and market trend research and he is responsible for studying over 30 countries. Full Bio

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