Sublime

Between us, we had everything we needed. I was a programmer. Bas was a designer. Henri, Greg, and Scott were editors.

We put this demo on the schedule for the next round of iPad reviews, where Henri, Greg, and Scott looked at the latest demos.

In this collaboration, some of these roles could be fluid. Bas sometimes wrote bits of code, and often his demos went directly to Steve without the help of a programmer like me. In the case of this keyboard demo, I contributed some design thinking by adding a second keyboard with bigger keys. Bas edited my choice of using the globe key to switch be

Demos served as the primary means to turn ideas into software. The setup of these demo review meetings reveals how we went about making our software great.

they reviewed work, they decided whether a design might pass muster with Steve while also estimating whether Henri’s programming team could implement the idea in a high-performance, bug-free manner given the remaining time in the schedule.

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.

Given this equation of many demos leading to a single product, the five of us in Diplomacy there with Steve formed a key unit in the process—we were a team that could create an individual CEO-level demo.

Sometimes there were several rounds of feedback and changes over many weeks before Scott would give the approval to bring the work into Diplomacy.