Terrific interview from Input Magazine.

A bit about the two iPad leads, just to whet your appetite.

Imran Chaudhri, Former Director of Design on the Human Interface team:

I came to Apple in 95 as an intern in the Advanced Technologies Group. When I finished school in 97, I came to Apple and Steve was there after the NeXT acquisition and he was going through and cutting and trimming the fat at Apple — and ATG was a place that he wasn’t a huge fan of. He wasn’t a huge fan of research for research sake and I wasn’t either, which was kind of an interesting thing. I always wanted to really, really ship products and ATG really wasn’t about that. Steve laid off everybody in ATG and I was kind of left to figure out what I was going to do. I started emailing Steve some ideas and we started working closely together and the relationship formed a lot of products, the revitalization of the Mac, going on to the iPod, the development of multitouch to the iPhone and iPad and, post, to a bunch of stuff like the Watch, the AirPods and HomePod, etc. All things we finished before I left a couple of years ago.

Bethany Bongiorno, Former Software Engineering Director:

I joined in 2008, actually, right after they shipped the first phone. I joined immediately after that and started as a project manager on the iPhone. There was a very small team back then; we sat kind of in one hallway. [The phone] was definitely a startup within Apple and I was brought on board because the project manager that was working there really didn’t like working with designers and really didn’t like working at the higher levels of the stack. She preferred kind of working at a lower level; the core operating system and the kernel and things like that.

Then very quickly after that, they told me that the real reason they had to hire me was because Steve had this pet project that he was really excited about and they needed somebody to lead that effort because the team really needed to remain focused on development of iPhone.

Fantastic read.