Imagine a big ship with thousands of people on board. The captain is driving it full speed to stay ahead of the competition and reach the destination faster. A misstep in the magnitude of few degrees in the compass would be catastrophic and within hours, the ship is moving far away from the destination and not towards it.
Now replace thousands with a billion, people with consumers and developers and you have it! The ship is Apple. Except that you don’t have a clear destination and course correction is much more difficult than one could imagine. More on this analogy a bit later.
The following is the golden triangle of Project Management – It says that the Quality of the work is a balancing act between Budget, Schedule and Scope (features).
To bring this framework to Apple’s context, let us remove Budget (for obvious reasons) and replace it with Quality. (This still preserves the original idea of 3 counter-intuitive forces defined at vertices of triangle) Now user satisfaction becomes the balancing act between Schedule, Quality and Scope.
Apple’s position, as explained in the picture above is slightly skewed in favour of schedule and features at this moment. They have an annual target (WWDC) to hit and tens of features to implement to entice users. With so many bugs being discovered in the recent past, Apple clearly seems to have compromised on quality.
Before we criticise Apple, we should understand that they most of the times do most of the things right. Our frustration on something not working well is a resultant of years of pristine delivery and perfection we have come to associate with Apple. To their credit, they have done extremely well considering every new feature they put is immediately available for a billion users.
The ship analogy I have opened this article with works extremely well because Apple today is at the juncture of course correction. If they don’t do it now, the hypothetical destination where the world is heading to will be far away in 3 years than today. Any delay in this process might result in Apple needing to turn the ship 90 degrees, loose momentum and loose thousands of users and developers on board.
What is the course correction then?
Functional vs Divisional
Many analysts today suggest that Apple needs to change the way it works and pivot towards a divisional – product oriented structure than remain a Functional – Collaboration oriented structure.
A Functional structure is where you have teams divided on Function. There is a team for software, a team for hardware, a team for design, a team for services, etc. This is a reason we have seen in recent times, updates to Mac OS being delayed due to higher effort being required for redesign for iOS on iPad, etc. Had the company been structured divisionally, ramp in requirement of one product wouldn’t have caused delays in other product.
A divisional structure is where you have teams divided based on products. There will be a team for iPhone, a team for Mac, a team for iPad and so on.. All these teams consist of people across various disciplines like design, software, hardware etc. The advantage of a company being divisional is that they can scale things proportionally (almost.) Throw more people, money into the problem the output almost scales. So the balancing act explained in the golden triangle framework above will be lot easier to achieve.
But.. This doesn’t work for a company like Apple which sells ecosystems and user experiences. Not products and Features. A divisional structure would never have produced features like Handoff that works seamlessly between Mac and iPhone. Similarly, features like iCloud key chain that syncs passwords between Mac and iOS devices, Airpods that switch between different Apple devices and messages in the cloud wouldn’t have been possible without strong collaboration between different product teams. A divisional structure could never achieve this.
Apple is growing with Mac in an overall shrinking PC market. They have virtually penetrated the phone market and the growth has slowed down/stagnant in recent quarters. iPad users are not replacing their iPads as fast as they are doing with iPhones and Laptops. Only avenue for Apple seems to cross-sell new products to the existing users until they invent the “Next Big” thing.
Three great products from Apple in recent times – Apple Watch, Airpods and Homepod works only when you are an Apple user already. None of these devices are targeted towards new comers as they require you to have an Apple product already.
CNN Quoting Warren Buffet:
“Apple has an extraordinary consumer franchise. I see how strong that ecosystem is, to an extraordinary degree. … You are very, very, very locked in, at least psychologically and mentally, to the product you are using. [IPhone] is a very sticky product.”
This strategy of selling more and more products to existing customers seem to be working for now on financial standpoint. But Apple needs a course correction in terms of delivering the software with agreeable quality, new features and on schedule.
A two year refresh cycle? Less features? More Focus? This question is best answered by people inside Apple. But clearly, dividing teams to various divisions is not the way to go. Stickiness comes from collaboration and products working well.. together in an ecosystem!
You loose stickiness, you loose everything.
Comments