Heartbeats, Not Finish Lines
David Epstein on General Magic:
Tony Fadell came away from the General Magic experience obsessed with constraints. “If you don’t have constraints, then make up constraints!” he told me the first time we spoke. Fadell was just out of college when he joined the company, and the formative lessons he learned there permeated the rest of his remarkable career.[...]
Fadell eventually moved on to the iPhone, where the team set internal deadlines for experimental prototypes. Fadell refers to those deadlines as “heartbeats,” because they determine the rhythm of work from the inside. They gave themselves just ten weeks to make a first basic version of an iPod-plus-phone, during which time they learned that the wheel would take up too much space. They allotted five months for a second version, and learned that more of their assumptions were wrong; an antenna and speaker couldn’t be as close together as they’d wanted. The third version worked, enough. The internal deadlines (or heartbeats) weren’t for finishing the entire project; they were signals for everyone to pause, collect lessons, and regroup.
Fadell later wrote: “We would have never reached that third design if we hadn’t given ourselves hard deadlines with the first two—if we hadn’t cut ourselves off after a few months, reset, and moved on. We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team.”
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Every General Magic alum I spoke with learned the importance of circumscribed freedom. Each one shared the painfully acquired lessons they had taken away about how to foist constraints upon big ideas to make them feasible. Many of those lessons were conceptually in line with the frequent, forced feedback at Pixar and This American Life, or with Catmull’s By Space Ship to the Moon point: Break down large endeavors into pieces that can be tested a little at a time.
Another format with consequences: the prototype did not have to be finished. It just had to be real enough to send a signal back to the team.