Apple’s Project Purple … “We’re starting a new project. It’s so secret, I can’t tell you what it is … but you will work harder than you ever have in your entire life”
November 8, 2023
Projects will dominate organisation work, replacing the old structures and job roles. They include labs and incubators, bringing focus, collaboration, change and speed.
Project Purple
“We’re starting a new project. It’s so secret, I can’t tell you what it is, or who you will work for. But what I can tell you is if you choose to accept this role, you’re going to work harder than you ever have in your entire life. You’re going to have to give up nights and weekends probably for a couple years as we make this product.”
Scott Forstall sent that email as he started his role as head of Apple’s iPhone software division. Since its debut in 2007 the iPhone has become both a cultural and economic phenomenon, replacing Blackberry and Nokia as the world’s most ubiquitous smart phone and transforming the entire market.
Soon after the first iPod was released in 2002, Steve Jobs began thinking about an Apple phone and in 2005 and initiated a number of phone-related projects, including the doomed partnership with Motorola. The iPhone’s ideation phase was kept low profile, with a limited investments and small teams. Many companies launch a full-scale project for every idea they generate, mostly ending up in wasted resources.
While many in Apple were enthused about a phone, Jobs was sceptical. As the project sponsor he was a powerful source of inspiration, a fierce curator of good ideas, but not afraid to reject less good ones. When he did give the green light to “Project Purple”, in November 2014, he was fully engaged, dedicating around 40% of his personal time to supervise and lead the teams.
The Purple team was one of the most talented in tech history. Whilst they had never made a phone before, they were the best engineers, the best programmers, and the best designers around. Sworn to secrecy for two and a half years. Whilst the final product might look beautifully simple, it was excruciating work. Jobs wanted to see a demo of everything. Designers would often create mock-ups of a single design element, like a button, 50 times before it met his exacting standards.
Jobs famously launched the revolutionary phone on 29th June 2007 at Macworld. The final months had been frantic, everyone 100% focused, as the team raced to meet the fixed launch date.
Apple spent $150m developing the iPhone, according to some estimates, a smart investment given its subsequent impact on the market. It transformed Apple’s business.
1.4 million iPhones were sold in 2007 rising to 201 million by 2016, and more than a billion by 2020. iPhones account for 69% of Apple’s total revenue, with an estimated margin over 50%, generating more than $54 billion profits.
Teams beat individuals
At design firm IDEO they have a poster that dominates their workplace “Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius”.
There are two messages. Firstly that teams are more experimental, their diversity bringing more ideas and options to explore. Second, that however smart an individual might believe they are, they are unlikely to go as far or as fast at the team.
In my experience it is often the team leader who thinks they know better, and seeks to dominate the team. But it might equally be a technologist who is convinced that they know what customers want better than customers, or another person driven by their own perspective and passion.
Project teams need the uniqueness and expertise brought by individuals but combined with the power of teamwork. The same tension exists at the business level. Many organisations feel they can or should do everything themselves, rather than working collaboratively with partner organisations.
It takes a more enlightened business to know what it is best at, and then bring together others to do other tasks. Look for example at Nespresso’s business model. They know that their authority and expertise lie in coffee, and in brand and marketing. Everything else from making their coffee machines to managing their call centres, they leave to others.
From functions to projects
“Projects not functions define today’s organisation” says my good friend, and global project guru, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez. “In the past 90% of our jobs were functional roles, regular and managing, while 10% were working on projects. Today 90% of most jobs are project-based, about change and innovation, and very little of it maintaining the status quo.”
Long gone, in most organisations, are the fixed offices with big desks to support executive egos. Gone too are the more open workspace cubicles, where people still liked to claim their domains, a sense of home at work. In a paperless world of clouds and laptops, desks are really not necessary. Gone too are the job descriptions which so many employees used to seek to be clear on their tasks, and refuse to go further.
Today everyone is part of a talent pool, and needs to have the flexibility to team and reteam with different leaders, different colleagues, different projects, as required.
Consulting firms have long worked in this way, and offer a useful model to learn from. I spent almost 10 years in such an environment, and over that time worked on around 100 different projects, many in different teams, for different clients, with different leaders. Stability came in the form that I belonged to a certain skill group, with a notional leader, largely concerned with recruitment and thought leadership. My performance was a based on a formula of how I spent my time and contributed to sales and delivery, plus my broader contribution to the organisation. It was an incredibly fluid structure, responsive to clients, but also flexible personally, in where I chose to live, and how I chose to allocate my time.
Fast and collaborative projects
Project teams are most likely to bring together a diversity of talent, from different functions and organisations, employees and external talent. This is most obvious in areas like marketing, where creative agencies will work with their clients as joint teams, but equally in technological developments where expertise naturally resides outside.
Projects give an organisation more agility, to flex their size as their workload demands, to tap into skills as needed, and accelerate progress. They can embrace the same fast and lean principles as applied specifically to innovation – starting with a “minimum viable project” then testing and learning, stretching ideas but also eliminating bad ones quickly, working in parallel where possible, testing and learning to evolve once implemented.
Projects typically need dedicated team spaces to work, people to lead, processes to operate, metrics to evaluate, and incentives to reward. Most organisations already have innovation spaces, which range from creative kitchens and idea labs, through to incubators that accelerate new businesses, and venture arms to host independent start-ups.
Daimler’s Lab1886, Disney ID8 Studios, Nestle’s HENRi lab, IKEA’s Future Home incubator, Nike’s Explore Team, Shell’s TechWork Labs. Whatever the form of these different environments, they all seek to create protected and dedicated spaces where ideas can emerge, new projects and new businesses can flourish.
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