Whiteboard discussions feel like work, but often they’re not, since it’s too difficult to talk productively about ideas in the abstract. Think of a cute puppy. The Purple team rarely worked without concrete and specific artifacts, and the story of the keyboard derby illustrates how.

Over time, Don and I began to understand and absorb the model Richard showed us. Look for ways to make quick progress. Watch for project stalls that might indicate a lack of potential. Cut corners to skip unnecessary effort. Remove distractions to focus attention where it needs to be. Start approximating your end goal as soon as possible. Maximize

Exactly how we collaborated mattered, and for us on the Purple project, it reduced to a basic idea: We showed demos to each other. Every major feature on the iPhone started as a demo, and for a demo to be useful to us, it had to be concrete and specific.

This push for simplicity had a purpose. Even though he was a high-tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry. He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.

Our demos to Steve carried the promise that we could deliver, and since showing work to Steve implied this willingness to commit, very few demos shown for the first time in these earlier meetings proceeded to him without further refinement.

This allowed him to create fully interactive demos that superficially looked and behaved like a Mac or an iPhone, even though they were just pictures and animations woven together with a little Lingo code. Even though his demos weren’t “real” software we could ship to customers, Director enabled Bas to make quick prototypes that provided a good sen

thought back to the Black Slab Encounter with Safari. That breakthrough didn’t represent an end; it signaled a beginning. As exciting as it was to see our web browser render the first sliver of a web page, we realized what the milestone meant.

In any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you’re trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it. And though coming up with such a vision is difficult, it’s unquestionably more difficult to complete the entire circuit, to come up with an idea, a plan to realize the idea, and then actualize the plan at

I had succeeded in getting my colleagues invested in my insertion point behavior work, not just by asking for their help in a single meeting and saying thanks when it was finished but by demonstrating through my ongoing actions in code changes, demo reviews, and lunchtime chats that their advice had mattered to me. Getting the insertion point to be