<ul><li>Innovate within practical project constraints like technology limitations and deadlines.</li><li>Understand necessary compromises between features and resources.</li><li>Pare down to the essentials through decisive prioritization for coherence and avoiding aimlessness as highlighted. </li></ul>

Working Within Constraints by Prioritizing Decisively

Debate opinions vigorously with evidence, but support final decision once made as described in "decisiveness". Avoid analysis paralysis. Execute the vision decisively with full team energy and dedication. Do not second-guess. Unified commitment once chosen is key.

Deciding Decisively to Execute Unitedly with Dedication

<ul><li>Explore a wide breadth of options with divergent thinking before deciding direction. </li><li>This opens possibilities rather than jumping to solutions. </li><li>Avoid confirmation bias by first diverging then converging.</li></ul>

Exploring Wide Options Before Choosing to Avoid Bias

Great products are built on a process of discovery and refinement.

Design is about trying many ideas, culling the great from the good.

Collaborate across specialties like design, engineering, and marketing to enrich ideas through collective wisdom. Overlap of skills and knowledge in dedicated team members creates shared vision and cohesion across the holistic product experience and appearance.

Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration for Cohesion

Page load speed was a major concern when developing Safari. Steve demanded that the browser be fast, so the team was tasked with developing a set of automated tests that would launch the browser and have it load a series of web pages in succession before reporting the speed.  They soon had their "Page Load Test" (PLT) benchmark in place, ensuring that the product became "faster by never getting slower.

The Safari Story

<ul><li>Quickly building prototypes to tangibly test concepts early allows concrete evaluation before over-investing. </li><li>Refine through continual iteration against benchmarks, like improving page load speeds iteratively using automated testing. </li><li>This avoids analysis paralysis and contributes to creating products that feel "alive" as described in the provided text.</li></ul>

Prototyping Early to Test Concepts Iteratively

<ul><li>As highlighted in "taste", maintain coherent user experience integrity throughout the design process. </li><li>Details like visual language should align to and advance the overall product vision and usage. </li><li>This contributes to a "gratifying and integrated whole."</li></ul>

Ensuring User Experience Integrity for Cohesion

Inside Apple's Design Methodology During the Steve Jobs Era. Software engineer Ken Kocienda, the author, worked on the first iPhone, among other projects.The author discusses Apple's software development process and why, in his opinion, it was a key factor in the company's ability to produce products of the highest caliber.

* WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs. Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era—the Golden Age of Apple. Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies. Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation—inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy—and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture. An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

KEN KOCIENDA

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