Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

The world is full of mediocre, middle-of-the-road companies creating mediocre, middle-of-the-road crap,

A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective.

Throughout your career, you’ll encounter some real assholes. These are (mostly) men and (sometimes) women who come in different flavors of selfish or deceitful or cruel, but have one unifying characteristic: you cannot trust them.

If you’re passionate about making something, you’ll need to doggedly pursue it, and that may mean earning less money for a while or staying at a problematic company so you can finish your project.

If this idea is going to eat up years of your life, you should at least take a few months to research it, build out detailed (enough) business and product development plans, and see if you’re still excited about it. See if it will chase you.

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins.

Marketing cannot just be figured out at the very end. When building a product, product management and the marketing team should be working together from the very beginning.

The best marketing is just telling the truth.

Engineers like to build products using the coolest new technology. Sales wants to build products that will make them a lot of money. But the product manager’s sole focus and responsibility is to build the right products for their customers.

The things you make—the ideas you chase and the ideas that chase you—will ultimately define your career. And the people you chase them with may define your life.