I know that Apple is incredibly secretive about their launches, and I'm not surprised that carries over to their internal culture, but, I'm incredibly skeptical of stories told from the point of view of an HR person that has every single incentive to hype up their revolutionary new process that unleashed productivity and improved morale.
Every single time I read a similar story and I had first or second hand knowledge of how things actually played out, the role of the person telling the story was massively stretched out.
Agreed. Also, to cite AirPods Pro as breaking the mould on a secrecy culture…it was pretty obvious that the airpod product would develop to have noise cancelling. The stakes for secrecy were much lower.
Every single time I read a similar story and I had first or second hand knowledge of how things actually played out, the role of the person telling the story was massively stretched out.