There’s been a lot of comparison about Apple having been in ‘founder mode’ under Steve Jobs, but whatever that mode really is, I believe Apple still runs that way today, but perhaps I’d call it multi-founder mode.

I’ll share two anecdotes about how Apple leaders are deeply involved in the details, and how that dynamic shows up when you build software at Apple.

My first example comes from the time I was working on pinch-to-zoom gestures for Safari on macOS.

Back in 2011, macOS was using technology that didn’t allow for quick and easy stretching of websites in continuous response to your gestures. Each frame of the animation had to repaint the entire webpage, which was too slow.

I came up with a trick to make this animation smoother. It involved taking a screenshot of part of the page and using that image as a layer to ‘animate’ the zooming in or out of the page. After the user let go, we quickly repainted and removed the screenshot once the webpage was ready.

In most cases, users shouldn’t notice that it wasn’t the real page being animated.

At Apple, there’s a strong culture of showcasing your work to higher management as a feature nears completion. I presented this solution to Craig Federighi, who was a VP of software and four levels above me.

It was my first time presenting to him. Nervous and tense, I demoed the feature with shaky hands. In fact, my hands were trembling so much that I could barely perform the gesture (ironically, Craig also had the same problem with my feature during his WWDC presentation).

What immediately surprised me about Craig was how deeply he wanted to understand the feature under the hood. He kept asking, ‘What happens in this scenario? What if the user does this? What about animations? How does the math work here?’

These weren’t superficial questions—he was spot on with many of them, and I didn’t expect to dive into such detail. But I was pleasantly surprised.

What was even crazier is that he remembered those details, and three years later, when I was working on something else, he suggested using similar tricks to what I had done with gestures for the new feature.

Another example with Craig is when I was working on an update to Safari that would allow users to bypass forced security rules preventing Java from running if it was deemed insecure by the Apple security team.

We were hashing out the details of what specific text should appear in pop-ups and dialog boxes. You’d think at a company like Apple, this task would be delegated to copywriters, right?

No. It was my upper management, Craig, and me, all on an email thread that went on for days, discussing things like which noun to use and where to place a comma.

Once again, Craig was deep in the details, replying late at night with valuable suggestions on how to move forward.

By this point, it’s clear that many styles of management can be effective. But Apple does run a derivative of the founder mode. I’d call it multi-founder mode where VPs of a specific domain are not afrid to get their hands dirty.