Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

So when you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?”

The key is persistence and being helpful. Not just asking for something, but offering something. You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged. You can always trade and barter good ideas; you can always be kind and find a way to help.

When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for human beings.

If you’re a manager—congratulations, you’re now a parent. Not because you should treat your employees like children, but because it’s now your responsibility to help them work through failure and find success. And to be thrilled when they do.

But pushing for greatness doesn’t make you an asshole. Not tolerating mediocrity doesn’t make you an asshole. Challenging assumptions doesn’t make you an asshole. Before dismissing someone as “just an asshole,” you need to understand their motivations.

hating your job is never worth whatever raise, title, or perks they throw at you to stay.

So don’t just make a prototype of your product and think you’re done. Prototype as much of the full customer experience as possible.

you have to find an opportunity to craft stories that stick with customers and keep them talking about you.

If you’re going to pour your heart into creating something new, then that thing should be disruptive.

But that’s the tricky thing with disruptions—they’re an extremely delicate balancing act. When they fall apart it’s usually for one of three reasons: You focus on making one amazing thing but forget that it has to be part of a single, fluid experience. [See also: Figure 3.1.1, in Chapter 3.1.] So you ignore the million little details that aren’t as exciting to build—especially for V1—and end up with a neat little demo that doesn’t actually fit into anyone’s life. Conversely, you start with a disruptive vision but set it aside because the technology is too difficult or too costly or doesn’t work well enough. So you execute beautifully on everything else but the one thing that would have differentiated your product withers away. Or you change too many things too fast and regular people can’t recognize or understand what you’ve made. That’s one of the (many) issues that befell Google Glass. The look, the technology—it was all so new that people had no idea what to do with it. There was no intuitive understanding of what the thing was for. It’s as if Tesla decided out the gate to build electric cars with five wheels and two steering wheels. You can change the motor, change the dash—but it still has to look like a car. You can’t push people too far outside their mental model. Not at first.

Keep going until you find an idea that won’t let you go.

There will be no break unless you force yourself to take one.

There are moments where you simply cannot function as a human, never mind a leader, and you need to recognize them and walk out the door. Don’t make a bad decision because you’re frustrated and overworked—get your head on straight and come in fresh the next day.

If something is your fault, tell them what you did. Tell them what you’ve learned from it. And tell them how you’ll prevent it from ever happening again. No evading, blaming, or making excuses. Just accept responsibility and be a grown-up.

It’s your responsibility as a leader not to try to deal with a disaster on your own. Don’t lock yourself in a room, alone, frantically trying to fix it. Don’t hide. Don’t disappear. Don’t imagine that by working for a week straight and not sleeping you can solve the problem yourself and nobody ever has to know. Get advice. Take deep breaths. Make a plan.

You can’t solve interesting problems if you don’t notice they’re there.

When building a product, product management and the marketing team should be working together from the very beginning. As you build, you should continue to use marketing to evolve the story and ensure they have a voice in what the product becomes.

Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.”

Building a product is like making a song. The band is composed of marketing, sales, engineering, support, manufacturing, PR, legal. And the product manager is the producer—making sure everyone knows the melody, that nobody is out of tune and everyone is doing their part.

It’s poison to think great ideas can only come from you. That you alone can hoard them in one place. And it’s stupid. Wasteful.

Delaying hard decisions, hoping problems will resolve themselves, or keeping pleasant but incompetent people on the team might make you feel better. It may give you the illusion of niceness. But it chips away at the company, bit by bit, and erodes the team’s respect for you.

Your job, whether you’re buying or selling, is to figure out if your two companies’ goals are aligned, if your missions nestle into each other, if your cultures make sense together.