Few people know the struggle that it’s faced to get there. Like the great Michelangelo, Apple might say, “If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

When I joined Apple in 2015 as an HR business partner, I marveled at the technical depth of its genius-level engineers. There seemed to be no problem they couldn’t solve. In a magical way, Apple had somehow brought together the best minds to create the best products in the world. But beyond the focus on innovating, it had a fundamental premise to the work: secrecy. This is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. The kind that arrives on the day of launch when nobody (not even most employees) anticipate how insanely great new products will be.

But this culture of secrecy had its dark sides. Hoarding of critical information. Pushing personal agendas. Infighting. As a new HR business partner, I was often pulled into these escalations. And it was usually about “that team not sharing.”

I started to wonder what this all meant. I’d hear one new employee after another, brilliant people, asking the essential question: “How do I operate like this? If I can only share information with certain people, how do I know who and when? I don’t want to end up fired or in jail.”

For those who were new to the company—including the vast majority of engineers—these dilemmas felt paralyzing. Meanwhile, with the product ecosystem growing and the technical challenges increasing, the need for collaboration grew. What to do, what to do?

I wrestled with this question, looking everywhere for answers until I saw an interview at Startup Grind with Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. The same Clayton Christensen who’d written the book The Innovator’s Dilemma, which had inspired Steve Jobs to crack the code of disrupting one’s own company (think iPad). The interviewer asked Christensen what he thought about Apple. He said he worried a lot about a lot of companies, like a mother worries sometimes. Then he said he worried particularly about Apple. But he said that Apple would be just fine, if it could do this one thing that Steve did: spend time staring in the mirror, essentially asking, “What do I need to do differently?”

This hit me hard. And it prompted this thought: “Yes. But what’s that mirror?”

Apple was a company that had historically innovated as small teams of engineers building long-standing relationships. But times had changed. The company’s growing workforce and scale of new people in different places increased the demands for innovation to accelerate connection, convergence, and collaboration. Secrecy was getting in the way. And what we’d seen with the development of AirPods was an example of exactly what would happen when we hadn’t solved for it. Teams were innovating for months in silos only to finally converge in the eleventh hour before launch, ending up in five- or six-hour-long daily meetings, causing tremendous friction and burnout. People were frustrated. They wanted to leave or to “never work with that one person again.”

Customers don’t know those behind-the-scenes struggles of giving birth to the AirPods; just like most engineers who developed the AirPods didn’t know the AirPods would be such an explosively successful, meme-worthy product for the public, selling millions, and creating an entirely new category. But at what cost? And if we were to take AirPods to the next level, how could we do it in a more seamless, relationship-building way?

From Covey to Catmull

At this time, Ian Clawson—a friend turned business partner—and I