What Makes the Apple Team So Productive?

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In your book, there's sort of a couple key ingredients that you would sort of distilled the apple experience down to. What do you think made apples unique? We were very, very good at combining complimentary strengths, right? So we had this this human inner face design team. When boss came up with tha idea, i came with an idea, iit judint didn't matter.

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.