Prior to his This American Life experience, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he was apt to think of freedom as an absence of editing:
It seems silly to me in retrospect, but it’s the same kind of “no limits” thinking that animated General Magic, and its failure left a powerful impression on those who lived it.
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.
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After General Magic, Fadell joined Philips as a twenty-five-year-old chief technology officer, where initially he “swung the pendulum too far the other way,” he said, and fell into micromanaging.
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He got the initial call from Apple in January 2001. In March, he showed Steve Jobs a Styrofoam model of a music player and got the green light. He wasn’t given a deadline to ship a first version, but Fadell insisted on setting one linked to an external beacon, “so that everybody has an understanding of what it looks like, and it isn’t just the boss cracking the whip.” He chose Christmas. It meant that rather than building the giant from the toes up like at General Magic, the team had to use existing technology resourcefully. Their soon-to-be famous scroll wheel, for instance, was inspired by the wheel on a Danish cordless phone that a team member brought to a meeting. The first iPod shipped that November.
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.”