This week’s readings encouraged me to reflect on my time at Apple this summer. I was lucky enough to be a marketing intern on the Apple Music team. My role was focused on retention efforts, with some dips into acquisition efforts as well. I particularly liked the Aigle Manifesto.

“Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.”

It’s probably obvious, but very true. On the business/creative end we tend to get ahead of ourselves — leaping to fantastical updates or new ideas without first consulting our engineering counterparts. I like this part of the job. It’s fun. I got to make recommendations without a care about the thousands of lines of coding it would take to get it done.

Anyway, back to the quote at hand. I remember this summer we were working on a large project with 10 external and international partners. We had a lot of ideas we needed to get engineered for us. Unfortunately, each entity also had to be individualized for each partner. Needless to say, the two engineers leading the back-end of things weren’t very happy with us. But collaboration is key. All we really had to do was explain why all of their labor would be needed and how it would benefit our customers. Oh, and keep our partners happy. Part of the reason I took this class is to be better at these types of conversations. And have a better understanding of what software engineers do.

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.”

This manifesto is brilliant. From beginning to end all principles should be followed by start-ups and large companies alike. Adding to the brilliance, it’s concise! We’ve all seen lengthy manifesto err to the way of redundancy (*ahem* the racist/misogynistic Google engineer guy that wrote a 10-page manifesto last year). But this manifesto epitomizes the very essence of its subject matter.

“Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done — is essential.”