Interdisciplinary design reviews and scale
A few articles I found on the design process. The first one here, the second here, which actually quotes the first.
Products get worked on in parallel by all departments at once—design, hardware, software—in endless rounds of interdisciplinary design reviews. Managers elsewhere boast about how little time they waste in meetings; Apple is big on them and proud of it. “The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” says Ive, an affable, bearlike Brit. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”—Article by Lev Grossman
The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible…The idea of there being these two separate things has to be forced away from our thinking. They are one team, which produce one product.—Jack Shedd
As the latter article states, this is very difficult as the size of the project or number of people involved in the project grows. But as we all see, from the products produced by Apple, it is worth it.
