My perspective comes from lots of hands-on experience with each of the three groups. Creative folks need time to let ideas marinate and mature into thoughtful assets. Technical folks (good ones, anyway) need scope to build the best possible product (if only I had a dime for every time a developer’s asked me “Well, if I do it this way it can work okay, but I think it’s better to do it this way because [insert comment about future capabilities or cool functionality]“, I’d be rich!). And of course, we can’t forget business folks, whose tolerance for time seem to fall lower every day. How can you get the three groups working together?

Recommendation: Building mutual respect and condensing each group’s issues into soundbites for the other groups is my approach to handling any initial situation. Project managers must have a strong curiosity for new domains and the nuances of each group’s work and background, which will help them argue for each side. This kind of position will guide a project to success for all stakeholders since it strikes a good balance and effectively negotiates a lot of tension out of the situation. However, when I’m in between a rock and a hard place, I have to side with the money but not without a fight for quality and extensibility. Doing right by the client is my mantra and I would never sacrifice that until I’m kicked out of the building.

What do you think?

The “what” is particularly tricky, since the “who” is actually composed of a larger public mindset whose perceptions of acceptable behavior, taste, and content continuously change. What is innovative can become intolerable very quickly. Consider the following example, bottled water. Earlier in the millennium (by the way, has society agreed on a name for this decade yet?), bottled water was very popular. Now, it’s shunned as wasteful and damaging to the environment.

Recommendation: The best way to meet this challenge is to adopt an all (versus the alternative “nothing”) approach. Making an implicit contract regarding censorship and moderation with the wider public is a futile effort if the objective is to broaden appeal to the widest possible market. Thus, letting everything in based on a very small and specific functional criteria set is probably the best and easiest method for Apple’s goals. Otherwise, you’ll have to adopt a continuously evolving (and large) censorship filter that adapts to users on the fly, based on sentiment analysis and international thinking (one common fallacy is that the US should be the arbiter of taste, but what about every other country that has access to the App Store?), which is the alternative. Apple is definitely in between a rock and a hard place.