Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

Brand ads made our egos feel better but they didn’t drive sales (you have to make great products for years before customers will buy a product simply because of your brand).

most importantly, product managers are the voice of the customer. They keep every team in check to make sure they don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal—happy, satisfied customers.

Your messaging is your product. The story you’re telling shapes the thing you’re making.

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.

If a product manager is making all the decisions, then they are not a good product manager.

There is a different model that aligns short-term business goals without neglecting long-term customer relationships. It’s based on vested commissions.

Rather than focusing on rewarding salespeople immediately after a transaction, vest the commission over time so your sales team is incentivized to not only bring in new customers, but also work with existing customers to ensure they’re happy and stay happy. Build a culture based on relationships rather than transactions.

The danger with traditional commission-based sales models is that they create two different cultures: a company culture and a sales culture.

First set up a mini–internal board populated by those other teams—customer support, customer success, operations—to approve each sales deal.

So a “no” from legal isn’t the end of the conversation—it’s the beginning. A great lawyer will help you identify roadblocks, then move around them and find solutions.

Lawyers love to win—they will never give up the fight, will battle to the death. But this is business. Death is not an acceptable option. You don’t get a great ROI with death.

When you’re in any kind of negotiation that includes legal, you always need to work out the fundamental deal points first, before the lawyers get called in—how

If a leader gets distracted from the customer—if business goals and spreadsheets full of numbers for shareholders become a higher priority than customer goals—the whole organization can easily forget what’s most important.

There can’t be any functions that you dismiss as secondary—where you casually accept mediocrity because it doesn’t really matter. Everything matters.

So don’t worry about picking your battles. Don’t rack your brain trying to decide which parts of your company need your attention and which don’t. They all do. You can prioritize, but nothing ever comes off the list.

I love asking dumb, obvious questions or questions from the customer’s perspective—usually three or four “Why is that . . . ?” “Why did that . . . ?” questions will get to the root of what you’re trying to understand, then you can dig in further.

You don’t have to be an expert in everything. You just have to care about it. No matter your leadership style, no matter what kind of person you are—if you want to be a great leader, you have to follow that one cardinal rule.

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.

Sometimes your kid won’t like you. Sometimes your employees won’t, either. Sometimes they’ll hate your guts.

When your team knows too much about you as a person, not just you as a CEO, they start dissecting your personal life to try to understand your decisions. Your motivations. Your ways of thinking.

The best thing about private boards is that you can keep them small—three to five board members is best. You can just have an investor, an insider, and an outsider with a specific expertise you really need.

And as always when you’re presenting numbers, it becomes much more important to craft a narrative. You have to tell a story.

Happy, functional, effective boards are all relatively small, full of experienced operators who have built companies before, think of themselves as mentors and coaches, and actually do the work—they

And if the primary way you’re attracting talent is through perks, then times will absolutely get tough.

If you constantly give someone flowers, after a few weeks they won’t be nearly as special. After a few months she’ll barely give them a second thought. Every week she’ll steadily lose interest. Until the moment you stop.

Just as dessert shouldn’t come before dinner, perks shouldn’t come before the mission you’re there to achieve. The mission should fill and fuel your company. The perks should be a sprinkle of sugar on top.

It’s your job as a CEO to constantly push your company forward—to come up with new ideas and projects to keep it fresh and alive.

There’s no challenge to being a babysitter CEO. No joy. And worse—it’s bad for the team. Bad for the company.