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, but I’ve spent my entire life chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence. I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from the best—from bold, passionate people who made a dent in the world.

A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective. They’ll loan you some of their hard-fought advice so you can discover your own solution.

Most business books have one basic thesis that they spend three hundred pages expanding on. If you’re looking for a range of good advice on various topics, you might need to read forty books, skimming endlessly to find the occasional nugget of useful information.

Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.

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.

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.”

I needed to learn. And the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who knew exactly how hard it was to make something great—who had the scars to prove it. And if it turned out to be the wrong move, well, making a mistake is the best way to not make that mistake again. Do, fail, learn.

The critical thing is to have a goal. To strive for something big and hard and important to you. Then every step you take toward that goal, even if it’s a stumble, moves you forward.

Throwing yourself out there and having everything blow up in your face is the world’s best way to learn fast and figure out what you want to do next.

A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics: It’s creating a product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing technology in a novel way that the competition can’t make or even understand. This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily. There should be an existing large market. The novel technology can deliver on the company vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platforms, and systems that support it. Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to their customers’ needs. It’s thinking about a problem or a customer need in a way you’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense once you hear it.

Customers need to see that your product solves a real problem they have today—not one that they may have in some distant future.

If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution.

A glaring example is Google Glass or Magic Leap—all the money and PR in the world can’t change the fact that augmented reality (AR) glasses are a technology in search of a problem to solve.

If you’re passionate about something—something that could be solving a huge problem one day—then stick with it.

You should know where you want to go, who you want to work with, what you want to learn, who you want to become.

“I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”

The key is persistence and being helpful. Not just asking for something, but offering something. You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged. You can always trade and barter good ideas; you can always be kind and find a way to help.

But don’t get stuck between the elephant’s toes so you can never see the whole beast. It’s easy to mistake navigating processes, red tape, job leveling, and politics for real personal growth.

As an IC, you need to occasionally do two things: 1. Look up: Look beyond the next deadline or project and forward to all the milestones coming up in the next few months. Then look all the way down to your ultimate goal: the mission. Ideally it should be the reason you joined the project in the first place. As your project progresses, be sure the mission still makes sense to you and that the path to reach it seems achievable. 2. Look around: Get out of your comfort zone and away from the immediate team you’re on. Talk to the other functions in your company to understand their perspectives, needs, and concerns. This internal networking is always useful and it can give you an early warning if your project is not headed in the right direction.

So don’t think doing the work just means locking yourself in a room—a huge part of it is walking with your team. The work is reaching your destination together. Or finding a new destination and bringing your team with you.

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.

When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement.

The other place where you’ll get useful data is in 1:1s with team members. It’s all too easy to turn 1:1s into friendly chats that go nowhere, so just as you need to have a process for your team meetings, your weekly meetings with individuals should have an agenda, a clear purpose, and should be beneficial to both sides. You should get the info you need about product development and your team members should get insight into how they’re doing. Try to see the situation from their point of view—talk about their fears and your own concerns out loud, reframe your thoughts so they can hear the feedback, understand the goals, clear up ambiguities or concerns. And don’t be scared of admitting that you don’t know all the answers. You can say, “Help me.” If you’re a first-time manager or simply new to the company or group, just tell people. “I’m doing this for the first time. I’m still learning. Please tell me what I can do to make things better.”

I did therapy and yoga for the same reasons: to find balance, to change the way I reacted to the world, to better understand myself and my emotions and how others perceived them.

“Most managers are afraid that the people who work for them are going to be better than them. But you need to think of being a manager more like being a mentor or a parent. What loving parent wants their child NOT to succeed? You want your kids to be more successful than you, right?”

Except customer panels can’t design for shit. People just can’t articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another, especially if they’re considering something completely new that they’ve never used before. Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it’s terrible.

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.

So you can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist. You just have to take that first step into the unknown. Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

“It’s not data or intuition; it’s data and intuition.”

And I want to make it very clear: hating your job is never worth the money. I need to repeat that: hating your job is never worth whatever raise, title, or perks they throw at you to stay.

In each of these moments, the customer asks “why?” Why should I care? Why should I buy it? Why should I use it? Why should I stick with it? Why should I buy the next version?

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 makes them simple. » It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”

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.

If part of the story didn’t work, then part of the product wasn’t going to work, either, and would need to be changed.

When you get wrapped up in the “what,” you get ahead of people. You think everyone can see what you see. But they don’t. They haven’t been working on it for weeks, months, years. So you need to pause and clearly articulate the “why” before you can convince anyone to care about the “what.”

You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.

The tools you need to make those decisions are below, organized by order of importance: 1. Vision: Know what you want to make, why you’re making it, who it’s for, and why people will buy it. You’ll need a strong leader or a small group to ensure the vision is delivered intact. 2. Customer insights: This is what you’ve learned through customer or market research or simply by thinking like your customer: what they like, what they dislike, what problems they experience on a regular basis, and what solutions they’ll respond to. 3. Data: For any really new product, reliable data will be limited or nonexistent. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a reasonable attempt to gather objective information—the scope of the opportunity, the way people use current solutions, etc. But this information will never be definitive. It won’t make your decisions for you.

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. You don’t want to staff up and then be forced to design by committee or put a ton of people on the sidelines, sitting on their hands, waiting for you to figure it out.

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. That inevitably leads to longer runways, longer schedules, and slower heartbeats. Much, much slower.

Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship—24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months. That applies to hardware and software, atoms and bits. Of course, there are things that take longer—research can take decades, for example. But even if it takes ten years to research a question, regular check-ins along the way ensure you’re still chasing the right answer. Or still asking the right question. Every project needs a heartbeat.

Look at Google. Its heartbeat is erratic, unpredictable. It works for them—mostly, sometimes—but it could work so much better. Google arguably only has one big external heartbeat each year at Google I/O—and most teams don’t bother aligning with it. They typically launch whatever they want whenever they want throughout the year, sometimes with real marketing behind it, other times with simple email campaigns.

You’ll move on to other opportunities, other jobs and journeys. Until you realize that no matter what you do, you can’t stop thinking about that one idea. 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.*

According to the book Super Founder, by Ali Tamaseb, around 60 percent of the founders of billion-dollar startups started another company before their wild success and many lost a ton of money. Just 42 percent of them had a previous exit of $10 million or more, so the majority “failed” by the standards of venture capital.

When you close your eyes, you should already know exactly who your first employees will be. You should be able to write down a list of five names without a second thought. If you don’t have that list of names ready before you start, you probably shouldn’t be starting.

You can make do without a cofounder. You can survive for a while without a team. But you can’t make it without a mentor.

But if you look at a promising young kid or enthusiastic career switcher and see only how much time they’ll take to train or the chance that they won’t work out, then you’re forgetting the power and drive of an ambitious talent right on the cusp of figuring out who they’re going to be.

In an interview I’m always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?” I also ask, “Why did you leave your last job?” Not the most original question, but the answer matters. I’m looking for a crisp, clear story. If they complain about a bad manager or being the victim of politics, I ask what they did about it. Why didn’t they fight harder? And did they leave a mess behind them? What did they do to make sure they left in the right way? [See also: Chapter 2.4: I Quit.] And why do they want to join this company? That reason had better be completely different from why they left their previous job. They should have a new story, a compelling story, about what they’re excited about, who they want to work with, and how they want to grow and develop.

Every Monday morning at Nest, that’s how my management meetings started: Who are the great people we want to hire? Are we making our hiring goals or retention metrics? If not, what’s the problem? What are the roadblocks? And how is the team doing? What issues do people have? How are performance reviews going? Who needs a bonus? How are we going to celebrate these accomplishments so the team feels valued? And, most importantly, are people leaving? Why? How are we going to make this job more meaningful and fulfilling and exciting than anything else out there? How are we going to help our people grow?

What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.