I gave Apple £1149 without a second thought
The 3 career lessons I got from that experience
I’ve spent £1149 without even blinking an eye. I needed something light and easy to work on at the beginning of my writing career. As a long-time Mac user, the choice was obvious. After I left the shop, I realised I didn’t even consider cheaper alternatives. Other brands weren’t even in the race.
On the way home, I started thinking about the value Apple creates with their products where nobody else can. When I plan to write a lot, the comfort of a keyboard alone convinced me. Did I pay £1149 for the convenience of writing? Yes. And I do it again.
Today in Code.Lead.Succeed Newsletter: We’ll talk about Value. How Apple mastered it and how you can use it in your career.
Apple isn’t selling laptops
Not a single Apple Store sells electronics. They sell comfort, ease of use and prestige. They guarantee you can start working on your machine after less than 10 minutes of initial configuration. They go the extra mile to deliver 10% more, doubling the value.
Other brands offer the best technical specs for the cheapest price. If you’re passionate about the hardware, it will help you decide. The average client won’t even know what they’re buying. Their criteria will be that it’s a computer, cheap, and maybe it looks better than the other one on the shelf.
It’s a mass market where the product's value is based on the chance that many customers will pick it, not on the quality it brings. You don’t go to McDonalds because you want a good burger or a healthy meal. You go there because it’s cheap and nearby. They have a lot of restaurants in the most crowded areas for that reason.
What the monkey does it have to do with Software Engineering?
I’ll ask you in return. Do you want to be seen as McDonald's or Apple of the Software Engineering market?
If the latter, please read on.
There are 3 aspects for you to use from the Apple product book in your career
How you write code
How do you position in your career?
How do you compete
Looking at Apple’s example lets you shift your understanding of value.
How you write code
As a developer, you support business. The business mission is to deliver value to the customer. If you focus too much on the technicalities of code, you’re like a traditional Windows laptop advertising CPU to stakeholders who don’t even know what it is.
When you speak with people outside the tech team, focus on their perceived value. Instead of design patterns, focus on what’s important to them. Money.
How much revenue increase will the new feature bring?
How much operational costs can we save by removing tech debt?
Speak language they understand. Deliver what they care about using your specialist software knowledge.
How do you position in your career?
If you start delivering business value instead of lines of code, it’s a significant first step. Next is to begin designing your career like an Apple product.
Yes, even as an employee, you’re a product. You sell yourself to the highest bidders. Instead of calling it sales meetings, we call it an interview or end-of-year review.
The prime example of “Windows laptop attitude” is when I see a CV with every Java framework created in the last 20 years on the first page. Knowing the code is essential, but it’s nothing special in 2023. Talking only about code puts you into the McDonald’s mass market.
If your offer appeals to everybody on the high street, you won’t be seen as a premium market engineer. Tailor what you know and how you present it in a way the right companies will be interested in hiring you.
It’s called Product Market Fit. You want to speak to companies you want to work for, not every company there is.
How do you compete
But software is a team sport … Tell it to the 100 others who applied for the same job as you.
You want to be a market on 1, like Apple. Figure out the unique value you can provide and use it to your advantage. Make sure it fits the market needs. Knitting mastery may be less valuable than optimising e-commerce checkout flows.
Like Apple, make your offer unique and premium. Don’t make the mistakes Samsung and others make. Copying others guarantees you’ll lose because it requires someone better to be there so you can take ideas from them.
Play your own game. Compete with yourself. It’s more challenging that way, but nobody does it, so it makes the long-term easier.
How to apply it?
I have a rule always to respect people and brands that do better than me and learn from them. It doesn’t matter if I use Apple products. They are doing a stellar job with their product and marketing. Why wouldn’t you want to learn how to get more than twice as much money for “the same” product?
The challenge for you this weekend is to design yourself as a premium product in a Software Engineering market. Think like Apple. Create yourself as unique and valuable as you can.
What’s the value you bring to the table?
What unique skills do you have that benefit the organisation?
How can you communicate it with your CV, online content and during the meetings?
I’ll give you my example
I focus on the business value of software
I know Finance, Business and Content Creation
I post on LinkedIn, and in this newsletter, I speak about business value
If you’re stuck looking at a blank page, pick an industry and check the content created by the leaders. Look for CEOs’ content rather than engineers. This will give you great insight into what’s important to focus on.
Sell the holidays, not the plane ticket
Sell the business or customer value, not the code.
That’s what Apple does: selling quality and convenience. That’s what Harley Davidson does: selling lifestyle, not motorbikes. That’s what Gordon Ramsey does: selling experience.
And it’s easy when everybody else sells like McDonald’s.
P.S.
If you feel stuck in your career. If you don’t know what to do next or where your career lead you, I have a good news for you:
On Wednesday, the 13th of September, I’ll be hosting a FREE webinar to show you the method I’ve been using for the last 20 years to achieve my goals.
It’s what made me lose my blue collar and exchange it for a Software Engineering job and what you can do the same day to regain peace of mind knowing where your career is going.
If it’s something you’d like or you know someone you like who’d benefit from that, you can register here!
See you there!
Awesome post, Dariusz. Love the analogy and it totally makes sense.
I personally do find trouble speaking in those terms, particularly on a role where devs are my customers and productivity is the business goal. Pretty much everything I do has the opportunity and generally will speed up devs. But there's so much of it to do (we're still a startup) and few of us comparatively that it seems like we're better off just using our gut and doing the thing rather than spending more time measuring than actually just doing it and moving on to the next one.
If you have any advice for someone in that type of situation, I'm always appreciative :)