Is There a Product Manager?

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At Apple, there were no product managers. The core of the company is soper engineers, human interface designers and executives. One day a team was told to stop working on every aspect of the iPhone's software development process. "The whole thing was high risk," says Steve Wozniacki.

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.