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 best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail. Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.

Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn. He showed the same level of attention to every piece of hardware, every word on the packaging. That’s how we learned the level of detail that was expected at Apple. And that’s what we started to expect of ourselves.

Write down a list of what you’re worried about for each project and person so you can immediately see when the list is getting too long and you need to either dive deeper or back off.

Weekly crib sheet

Storytelling is how you get people to take a leap of faith to do something new. It’s what all our big choices ultimately come down to—believing a story we tell ourselves or that someone else tells us. Creating a believable narrative that everyone can latch on to is critical to moving forward and making hard choices. It’s all that marketing comes down to. It’s the heart of sales.

Here are the different assholes you might have to deal with: 1. Political assholes: The people who master the art of corporate politics, but then do nothing but take credit for everyone else’s work. These assholes are typically incredibly risk averse—they’re focused exclusively on surviving and pushing others down so they can reach the top. They don’t make anything themselves—are absent for the real work and tough decisions—but they’ll happily leap in to cry “I told you so” when anybody else’s project has a hiccup, then try to swoop in to “fix” it. They often won’t speak up in large meetings because they never want to be seen by their bosses as being wrong—they can’t risk looking like an idiot. Instead they’ll work in the background to undermine you and everyone else who isn’t on their “team.” These assholes usually build a coalition of budding assholes around them—copycats who see it as their path to success. And there’s always one person who they hate and plot against and have to push out of the way somehow.

Types of as holes you need to work woth

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. Make the intangible tangible so you can’t overlook the less showy but incredibly important parts of the journey. 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.

There are three elements to every great idea: 1. It solves for “why.” Long before you figure out what a product will do, you need to understand why people will want it. The “why” drives the “what.” [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] 2. It solves a problem that a lot of people have in their daily lives. 3. It follows you around. Even after you research and learn about it and try it out and realize how hard it’ll be to get it right, you can’t stop thinking about it.

Before you commit to executing on an idea—to starting a company or launching a new product—you should commit to researching it and trying it out first. Practice delayed intuition. This is a phrase coined by the brilliant, Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman to describe the simple concept that to make better decisions, you need to slow down.

That’s when you stop running from it and start chipping away at the risks, one by one, until you’re confident enough that they’re worth taking. If that does not happen, then it’s not a great idea. It’s a distraction. Keep going until you find an idea that won’t let you go.*

Doing your research before falling in love with an idea is important before waisting too much time

Everyone thinks they can do your job better—until they actually have to do it and deliver. So

Not everyone can be a great designer, but everyone can think like one. Designing isn’t something in your DNA that you’re simply born with—it’s something you learn. You

To be a great designer you can’t lock yourself in a room—you have to connect with your team, with your customer and their environment,

1. 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.

3. The product is the brand. The

4. Nothing exists in a vacuum.

5. The best marketing is just telling the truth. The

The things you pay attention to and care about become the priorities for the company. The best CEOs push the team to strive for greatness, then take care of them to make sure they can achieve it. The worst CEOs care only about maintaining the status quo.

The best CEOs always know the outcome of a board meeting before they walk through the door.

Good CEOs walk in with a presentation of where the company was, where it is now, and where it’s headed this quarter and in the years to come. They tell the board what’s working but they’re also transparent about what isn’t and how they’re addressing it.

In my experience it takes most people about a year and a half before they can start thinking about something new. There’s a reason people in some cultures wear black for twelve months after a death. That’s how long it takes to come to terms with this kind of loss.