You're on the Purple Team

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There were no product manage roduct managers, no c a engineers, no like until later, until later. We probably never had more than 20 softer engineers and maybe ten designers,. There was also this other team of designers, which in apple we called the human inter face team, the h i team, id human interface. And so there was thi small team, half dozen softer engineers and and h i designers, and then executives, managers.

In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z’s Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection.

They discuss Ken’s unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari web browser to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and features like Autocorrect, what it was like to demo new products for Steve Jobs, and more.