Part of the Team

In academia, the key metric of success is publications and references to your publications. It was easy to do work on a paper just to get your name on it. Many papers have a long list of authors when we know only the first few had the biggest impact. But there is still a striving to hit this aim, where we put on paper that you own this research. It is used to show people what impact you can have. That works for academia, but in industry, it is much harder to concretely own a specific project even though some people may try. The sheer volume of people required to build anything great means no matter the person, their impact on that product relative to the scope is a small percentage. 

When I started at Apple, I was told I would be the algorithm Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for wrist-detection. It's easy to feel in use the name that it was "My Feature" even though I didn't come up with the concept of wrist detection; I was just working on the algorithm. As the project unfolded, I got a deeper understanding of what it means to work on a team.

At my previous company, I was on a small team, primarily my boss and a coworker, and we were responsible for the face recognition engine. That meant we had to do the research, write production code, and do our own quality assurance (QA). There was another QA group, but they focused on the whole system. It seemed pretty clear which modules or research bits each person owned. The company was shipping a larger product, and we were all on the same team so to speak, but it didn't feel like what they worked on greatly impacted my work on a daily basis.

As the Apple Watch project unfolded, it became clear that ownership was not singular. Even for a single component like wrist detection, I wasn't the decision maker. I had to find people who had a stake in its outcome, and a decision was made, largely by consensus. Even for implementation, the initial off-wrist algorithm was made by one engineer, then between a coworker, my manager, and I, the rest of the algorithm was finalized. This wasn't an easy process nor was it completely owned by just us. I sat next to our QA, and we worked together everyday trying to understand all the use cases, all the failure points. 

Then I would design a user study, and I would collect data. I designed a few user studies, but again, to say that it was only me is a misstatement. I would make a rough idea or even more detailed, and I would go to one of three groups we ran user studies with. The protocol would get revised by all of us, and then we would do our user study. Even this would require software support some times if we didn't get the data we wanted. We had an internal apps team to make any of these changes which then went through App QA. 

I analyzed a lot of data, and all that data required people to volunteer their time. I would tidy up results, and my manager would communicate them up to the executive level. Then in the factory, they had test stations, and we had to make sure the hardware was in specification. There was a tremendous effort across multiple groups to accomplish this. Finally, there was the carry population who gave actual feedback on the user experience, which was vital to making improvements and understanding if our algorithm was working correctly. 

Of course, I also did not design and build the hardware. I didn't design or build the operating system. I didn't manage resources nor did I manage schedule. However, I felt I was connected to all of these people. I felt tied into this team, this very large team. 

When we launched the Watch, I felt a great deal of accomplishment and ownership of the entire Watch, not just Wrist Detection. I didn't feel I owned Wrist Detection, but I felt we owned it as a team. I felt part of the entire Watch team and Apple not just my org or my group or my feature. I see the Watch and think, "That's my Watch; That's our Watch."