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by Schultzy 5566 days ago
Does anyone know if Apple has any sort of employee empowerment policy?

At start-ups, it doesn't (or at least shouldn't) take much for the decision makers to hear from customers and respond in a way that "wow"s them, but I'd be curious to know what processes or mechanisms specifically a large company like Apple has in place to catch these kinds of opportunities.
1 comments
Mafana0 5566 days ago
The guys who did that are VPs, according to the article:

"It was escalated as something funny, and two of the VPs got wind of it."

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Schultzy 5566 days ago
Right, but I'm wondering HOW they found out about it. Was is just dumb luck that a particular go-getter found out about it and passed it up or do they have some kind of "pass interesting things up" policy and actively encourage it? It obviously wasn't the Veeps that were receiving the the returned iPad.
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protomyth 5566 days ago
I actually can see it traveling pretty fast. District Manager calls Store Manager to find out how things are going. Store Manager does a "You gotta hear this return reason...". Or, the someone at the store calls corporate to find out what to code this return as. Never underestimate the number of stories that start "This guy gave returned it because....".
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Splines 5566 days ago
Internally at MSFT we have support discussion lists that are used by field personnel to interact with the product team; our VP is on the alias and sometimes answers questions with the products that they used to directly work on.

Granted, joining a discussion list is easier than monitoring product returns, but there is probably an analog for the retail channel (i.e., there is probably an upwards-facing report on iPad 2 sales and returns, and this note was probably included as an item of interest). I'm just guessing though.

Odds are that anybody who really knows isn't going to tell you.

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