Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective.

a joyful workplace could make a joyful product.

It’s easy to mistake navigating processes, red tape, job leveling, and politics for real personal growth.

The job of an individual contributor (IC)—a person who doesn’t manage others—is usually to craft something that needs to be completed that day or in the next week or two. Their responsibility is to sweat the details, so most individual contributors depend on their managers and executive team to set a destination and lay out a path for them so they can keep their focus on the work.

Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. You’ll no longer be doing the things you do really well—instead you’ll be digging into how others do them, helping them improve. Your job will now be communication, communication, communication, recruiting, hiring and firing, setting budgets, reviews, one-on-one meetings (1:1s), meetings with your team and other teams and leadership, representing your team in those meetings, setting goals and keeping people on track, conflict resolution, helping to find creative solutions to intractable problems, blocking and tackling political BS, mentoring your team, and asking “how can I help you?” all the time.

Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.

Honesty is more important than style. Everyone has a style—loud, quiet, emotional, analytical, excited, reserved. You can be successful with any style as long as you never shy away from respectfully telling the team the uncomfortable, hard truth that needs to be said.

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.

It wasn’t because I was a crazy person or because becoming a manager was turning me into one. 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.

Helping people succeed is your job as a manager. It’s your responsibility to make sure they can become the best versions of themselves. You need to create a setting where they can surprise you. And where they can surpass you.

You need to let go of taking pride in your individual daily accomplishments and start taking pride in the accrued wins of your team.

this also isn’t a dictatorship. You can’t give orders without explaining yourself. So tell the team your thought process. Walk through all the data you looked at, all the insights you gathered, and why you ultimately made this choice. Take people’s input. Listen, don’t react. There may be a minority of team members who agree with the decision; there might be some good feedback that makes you modify your plan. If not, give the speech: I understand your position. Here are the points that make sense for our customers, here are the ones that don’t. We have to keep moving and, in this instance, I have to follow my gut. Let’s go.

Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them. Because if you follow your gut and your gut is wrong, then there’s nowhere else to cast blame. But if all you did was follow the data and you still failed, then clearly something else was wrong. Someone else screwed up.

And right now you’re selling—your vision, your gut, your opinion. So don’t just hit them with the classic “This is Jane, this is her life, and this is how her life changes when she uses our product” slide. Helping people see things from the customer’s perspective is a critical tool, but it’s just part of what you need to do. Your job in this moment is to craft a narrative that convinces leadership that your gut is trustworthy, that you’ve found all the data that could be gleaned, that you have a track record of good decisions, that you grasp the decision makers’ fears and are mitigating those risks, that you truly understand your customers and their needs and—most importantly—that what you’re proposing will have a positive impact on the business. If you tell that story well, if you bring people along with you on that journey, then they will follow your vision, even if there’s no hard data to back you up.

But pushing for greatness doesn’t make you an asshole. Not tolerating mediocrity doesn’t make you an asshole. Challenging assumptions doesn’t make you an asshole. Before dismissing someone as “just an asshole,” you need to understand their motivations.

Jobs are not interchangeable. Work is not just a sweater you can take off when things get hot. Too many people jump ship the second they need to dig in and really push through the hard, grinding work of making something real. And when you look at their résumés you can instantly see the pattern.

People are easily distracted. We’re wired to focus our attention on tangible things that we can see and touch to the point that we overlook the importance of intangible experiences and feelings. But when you’re creating a new product, regardless of whether it’s made of atoms or electrons, for businesses or consumers, the actual thing you’re building is only one tiny part of a vast, intangible, overlooked user journey that starts long before a customer ever gets their hands on your product and ends long after. 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.

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.”

Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it?

So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example. Walk through how a real person will experience this product—their day, their family, their work, the change they’ll experience. Just don’t lean so far into the emotional connection that what you’re arguing for feels novel, but not necessary.

Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people and do more to convince them to buy your product than any amount of talking you do about yourself on your own platforms. 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.

But that’s the tricky thing with disruptions—they’re an extremely delicate balancing act. When they fall apart it’s usually for one of three reasons: You focus on making one amazing thing but forget that it has to be part of a single, fluid experience. [See also: Figure 3.1.1, in Chapter 3.1.] So you ignore the million little details that aren’t as exciting to build—especially for V1—and end up with a neat little demo that doesn’t actually fit into anyone’s life. Conversely, you start with a disruptive vision but set it aside because the technology is too difficult or too costly or doesn’t work well enough. So you execute beautifully on everything else but the one thing that would have differentiated your product withers away. Or you change too many things too fast and regular people can’t recognize or understand what you’ve made. That’s one of the (many) issues that befell Google Glass. The look, the technology—it was all so new that people had no idea what to do with it. There was no intuitive understanding of what the thing was for. It’s as if Tesla decided out the gate to build electric cars with five wheels and two steering wheels. You can change the motor, change the dash—but it still has to look like a car. You can’t push people too far outside their mental model. Not at first.

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.

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.

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. That last point is important.

By the end of the first iPhone project we had about eight hundred people working on it. But can you imagine what would have happened if all eight hundred had been with us from the beginning, watching us abandon the vision and restart the project? And then do it again a few months later? It would have been mayhem. Eight hundred people panicking and us endlessly reassuring everyone, focusing on the positive, trying to keep all those people in sync with a truly crazy number of iterations.

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.

After a few months, we scrapped the whole system. No more half days. We organized our time into bigger chunks—weeks, months. We started taking a macro view of our projects. And that enabled us to build the V1 of Velo in about eighteen months. Then we handed it, gleaming and new, to sales and marketing. And they had absolutely no idea what to do with it. They’d never seen it before. They didn’t know how to sell it, where to sell it, how to advertise it. They had been an afterthought to us, and now we were an afterthought to them.

So when we started work on the Nest Protect smoke and CO alarm, our second product, you’d think it would be easier. That everything we’d built already would let us skip a few steps. But the second you start a new product, you have to hit the restart button—even if you’re at a big company. Sometimes it’s even harder the second time around because all the infrastructure that’s been built up for the first product gets in the way. So you’ll still need to go through at least three generations before you get it right. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. Every product. Every company. Every time.

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.

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamin pills are good for you, but they’re not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference. But you’ll notice real quick if you forget a painkiller.

Painkillers eliminate something that’s constantly bothering you. A regular irritation you can’t get rid of. And the best pain—so to speak—is one you experience in your own life. Most startups are born from people getting so frustrated with something in their daily experience that they start digging in and trying to find a solution.

Not every product idea has to come from your own life, but the “why” always has to be crisp and easy to articulate. You have to be able to easily, clearly, persuasively explain why people will need it. That’s the only way to understand what features it should have, whether the timing i...