Apple Cover Letter

Senior PM, AR Applications

Hi Apple AR folks!

I'd love to chat about the PM role you've got open. It sounds like what you're looking for is not only someone with the standard set of PM skills, but also someone who's got creative and UX chops to conceive of brand new things in a new medium. As a hybrid PM/designer on early stage products, this is the intersection where I've been my whole life.

Experience

Probably the most directly relevant experience I have for AR is that I was a video game designer and 3d artist at Pandemic Studios working on games for Activision and Sony. But that's just a small part of what I've done. Since then I've created products in a bunch of industries - education, health, social networks, dev tools, journalism, etc. The driving forces behind my career path have been to work on things at the intersection of tech and human psychology, a desire to skate where the puck is going, and to create new amazing things. I think my experiences in these industries give me a wealth of ideas and perspectives that I can bring to bear on a new medium like AR.

Culture fit

I've been meaning to work at Apple for many years, as my close friends can all attest. My approach to product - intuitive, design-centric, narrowly scoped, broadly ambitious, relentlessly iterated - aligns with everything I've seen and heard from conversations with current and ex-Apple friends. While I've enjoyed the dynamism of startups in the past, I'm now interested in making a career at Apple and working with the types of people that approach product the way I do.

Learn more about me

I write about product here on my blog; these are some things you might enjoy reading that will give you a sense for how I think:

Spaces - concept piece on redesigning Apple OS ecosystem, reframing UX around a higher level 'Space' concept. Of note here is how this intersects with new more constrained modalities like AR.

Category Defining Products - essay that shows you a bit how I think about what makes for great products; especially relevant for AR is how to scope it and pick the right constraints.

Minecraft Earth Should Be The First AR Killer App - discussing the need for killer app in AR and that MC:E has the ingredients to be something like that.

Explorations in Tactile Experiences - gives you a sense for my exploratory artistic side, skills especially relevant for products in new modalities.

De-Escalating Social Media - essentially a PRD for twitter, shows you how I approach integrating human psychology into product. This went viral last month and is my most popular post.

When to Add Hierarchy - example of how I updated design / info architecture based on product strategy at OneSignal.

Thoughts on iPad (2016) - posts discussing rationale for Apple to create a low cost iPad, which of course launched about 9 mos later. Shows you my interest in broader hardware/software alignment and approach to product segmentation.

Please also see my Portfolio which includes a lot more detail on my past work.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to chatting!

Nick


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