Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

Scott also kept his job as demo gatekeeper for Steve because he advanced work only when it was of sufficiently high quality.

He reasoned these alone would be sufficiently compelling proofs of concept.

Once in the review session with Steve, our efforts met with his editing. In our case, Steve saw something he liked, but he found the demo unnecessarily complicated, so he unpacked it. This deconstruction wasn’t typical, but it was completely in character.

From my standpoint, as an individual programmer, demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. The demo was my question. Steve’s response was the answer. While the pronouncements from the Greek Oracle often came in the form of confusing riddles, that wasn’t true with Steve. He was always easy to understand. He would either approve a demo

Chief among our missteps was failing to conceive of our software as a single product instead of as a set of separate projects. We never figured out how to integrate the pieces. Nothing worked smoothly.

Don and Richard endured this build ordeal along with me, and during lunch and coffee breaks we commiserated with each other about how bored we were. We couldn’t fob this work off on junior programmers or interns either. Apple didn’t work like that. Secrecy was one reason, but, more important, Apple didn’t separate research and development from soft

Like the movie, demos should be specifically choreographed, so it’s clear what must be included and what can be left out. Those things that aren’t the main focus of a demo, but are required to create the proper setting, must be realized at the correct level of detail so they contribute to the whole rather than detract from the vision.

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

We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the