Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

Instead of moving forward with a design, you’d hear, “Well, let’s just test it.” Nobody wanted to take responsibility for what they were making.

Despite the fact that many companies now rabidly test every single element of their product and unquestioningly follow the clicks, A/B and user testing is not product design. It’s a tool. A test. At best, a diagnosis. It can tell you something’s not working, but it won’t tell you how to fix it. Or it can show you an option that solves one hyperlocal issue but breaks something else downstream.

If a product is really new, there’s nothing to compare it to, nothing to optimize, nothing to test.

Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

Think through the problems that are plaguing your project. Write down thoughtful, insightful solutions. Present them to leadership. Those solutions may not work, but the process will be at the very least educational.

You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters.

The only time hardware is worth the headache of manufacturing and packaging and shipping is if it’s critically necessary and transformative. If hardware doesn’t absolutely need to exist to enable the overall experience, then it should not exist.

Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems.

Disruption: A fork on the evolutionary tree—something fundamentally new that changes the status quo, usually by taking a novel or revolutionary approach to an old problem.

To maintain the core of your product there are usually one or two things that have to stay still while everything else spins and changes around them.

Look at Kodak. Look at Nokia. Companies that become too big, too comfortable, too obsessed with preserving and protecting that first big innovation that put them on the map—they topple. They unravel. They die.

If you do it right, one disruption will fuel the next. One revolution will domino into another.

The lesson is about when and how vision and data should guide your decisions. In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else.

But we would have never reached that third design if we hadn’t given ourselves hard deadlines with the first two—if we hadn’t cut ourselves off after a few months, reset, and moved on.

So keep your project small as long as you can. And don’t allocate too much money at the start. People do stupid things when they have a giant budget—they overdesign, they overthink.

Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship—24 at the limit.

You need natural pauses so people can catch up to you—so customers and reviewers can give you feedback that you can then integrate into the next version.

So have at least one really big launch and another one to three smaller launches every year. Apple’s external heartbeat used to thump loudest at the annual MacWorld conference in San Francisco. That event drove the pace of the whole company.

Until you optimize the business, not just the product, you can never build something lasting.

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.

Remember, once you take money from an investor, you’re stuck with them. And the balance of power shifts. A VC can fire a founder, but a founder can’t fire their VC.

A coach helps because they know the company; a mentor helps because they know you. The best is a combination of the two—someone who understands both worlds—a mentor/coach who can help people see the bigger picture about what the business may need as well as what they need personally.

Beware of too many perks. Taking care of employees is 100 percent your responsibility. Distracting and coddling them is not.