How To Stay Flat Like Apple and Innovate
Staying flat is hard but there are some key lessons we can draw from the Apple way:
Trust in experts; empower them to make decisions - Time and time again, I saw Craig, and the Exec Sponsors rely upon the DRIs to provide them their opinions, data, push back, collaborate on hard issues and come up with ideas to resolve some insanely tough questions. But, ultimately, these leaders made the tough calls and owned them.
Elevate skills and expertise, not the title - Engineering DRIs are not directors or VPs, they can be individual contributors who are best suited for the task at hand or the Engineering Manager of a given functional area with the most deliverables. For example, an iCloud Photos feature’s DRI will be the Engineering Manager from the Photos App engineering team. An iMessage feature could have DRI who is an individual contributor engineer in the Apple Wallet team. Give them ownership and pride in the work they do and you will build A+ players, not worker drones..
Decentralize tactical decisions; Centralize strategic decisions - The power of DRI or Directly Responsible Individual is a powerful one. Not only does it create accountability but visibility and career growth. By enabling a DRI structure for day to day decisions, you open up the leaders to have time to evaluate and make strategic decisions, whilst allowing frontline engineers to become experts and grow personally.
QA needs ownership & authority from the start - I cannot emphasize this enough, you need test and quality engineers involved from the start. If you don’t have a dedicated QA team then agree upon the exit criteria for each feature or product as part of the requirement and planning phase.
Build centers of excellence, not tiny empires - how do you build centers of excellence and a bench full of experts? Allow individual engineers to take on large and important work. You don’t need an army of engineers working on features; sometimes a small squad of experts on your bench is enough. How many engineers do you think worked on Apple Pay for the Web or the iOS Home App v1.0? Hint - I can count them on one hand.
