Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

I follow my curiosity and my passion.

Networking is something you should be doing constantly—even when you’re happily employed.

Come with suggestions to fix the intractable problems that you and your team face.

Speak to your manager, HR, other teams—find appropriate leaders who will listen. Hopefully some will agree with you, or challenge your view or help you refine your thinking. It’s all useful. Get their perspectives.

if it’s critically necessary and transformative.

“Don’t tell me what’s so special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.”

It’s the whole user experience—a chain that begins when someone learns about your brand for the first time and ends when your product disappears from their life, returned or thrown away, sold to a friend or deleted in a burst of electrons.

Your customer doesn’t differentiate between your advertising and your app and your customer support agents—all of it is your company. Your brand. All of it is one thing.

Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in rough wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Create detailed mock-ups that show how a customer would travel from an ad to the website to the app and what information they would see at each touchpoint. Write up the reactions you’d want to get from early adopters, the headlines you’d want to see from reviewers, the feelings you want to evoke in everyone. Make it visible. Physical.

That’s how you hack your brain. How you hack the brains of everyone on your team.

You should be prototyping your marketing long before you have anything to market.

It turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight.

It’s what allows businesses to reach beyond their product and create a connection—not with users and consumers, but with human beings.

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

It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides.

It takes complicated concepts and make...

» It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it fo...

He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“Maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins

not so disruptive that you won’t be able to execute, not so easy to execute that nobody will care.

So we learned to underpromise and overdeliver.

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.

one giant touchscreen, no hardware keyboard—there

in the end Steve was proven right. The iPhone changed everything. And it was only possible because he stuck to his vision.

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.

This is the moment when you need to gather data. Your gut got you to this point, so find data to help you understand why your gut was wrong.

Learn your lessons—especially the hard ones. Then try again. Back to the drawing board.

Eventually your vision will improve. You’ll learn to trust your gut again.

Here’s the trick: write a press release.

To write a good press release you have to focus. The press release is meant to hook people—it’s how you get journalists interested in what you’re making. You have to catch their attention. You have to be succinct and interesting, highlight the most important and essential things that your product can do.

No problem. Write another press release.

That’s why you take a deep breath, surround yourself with great people, and head out into the wilderness.

You need constraints to make good decisions and the best constraint in the world is time.

When you’re handcuffed to a hard deadline, you can’t keep trying this and that, changing your mind, putting the finishing touches on something that will never be finished.

you have to execute and get creative to finish on time.

The external heartbeat, the constraint, drives the creativity, which fuels the innovation.

We only started making hard decisions—this stays, this gets cut, this is good enough, this isn’t—when we had no other choice.

We couldn’t spin endlessly anymore, trying to reach perfection. General Magic was flailing and needed a pair of handcuffs. It needed to set a date for launch and hold to it.

So you have to force yourself to stop. Construct a deadline and handcuff yourself to it.

For the first version of the iPhone, we gave ourselves ten weeks. Ten weeks to see if we could make it work. If we could get to the minimal version that would prove that this was the right direction to pursue.

Reset. Start over.

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.

We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team.

Don’t go crazy hiring people just because you can. With most projects in the concepting stage, you can get a huge amount done with around ten people or even fewer.

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

they overdesign, they ...

That inevitably leads to longer runways, longer schedules, and slower heartbe...