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.

There’s often an assumption that if you find the right job when you’re young, you can guarantee some level of success. That your first job out of college connects in a straight line to your second and your third, that at each stage of your career you’ll use your inevitable wins to propel yourself upward.

And I spent the next ten years getting kicked in the stomach by Silicon Valley before I made something people actually wanted. In the process I learned a lot of hard, painful, wonderful, stupid, useful lessons.

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

Traditional schooling trains people to think incorrectly about failure. You’re taught a subject, you take a test, and if you fail, that’s it. You’re done. But once you’re out of school, there is no book, no test, no grade. And if you fail, you learn. In fact, in most cases, it’s the only way to learn—especially if you’re creating something

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?” Not “How much money do I want to make?” Not “What title do I want to have?” Not “What company has enough name recognition that my mom can brutally crush the other moms when they boast about their kids?”

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.” —ANONYMOUS

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.

But when you’re early in your career—and early in your life—the worst that can happen if you take big risks is probably moving back with your parents. And that is not shameful. 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.

That’s what you’re looking for when you’re young, when you think you know everything then suddenly realize you have no idea what you’re doing: a place where you can work as hard as you can to learn as much as you can from people who can make something great. So even if the experience kicks your ass, the force of that kick will propel you into a new stage of your life. And you’ll figure out what to do next.

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. There’s just no reason for the general public to buy them. Not yet.

Management consulting should never be your endpoint—it should be a way station, a brief pause on your journey to actually doing something. Making something.

Too many people see work as a means to an end, as a way to make enough money to stop working. But getting a job is your opportunity to make a dent in the world. To put your focus and energy and your precious, precious time toward something meaningful. You don’t have to be an executive right away, you don’t have to get a job at the most amazing, world-changing company right out of college, but you should have a goal. You should know where you want to go, who you want to work with, what you want to learn, who you want to become. And from there, hopefully you’ll start to understand how to build what you want to build.

However, the only thing that can make a job truly amazing or a complete waste of time is the people. Focus on understanding your field and use that knowledge to create connections with the best of the best, people you truly respect. Your heroes. Those (typically humble) rock stars will lead you to the career you want.

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.

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.

Junior individual contributors spend 80 percent of their time looking straight down—maybe a week or two out—to see the fine points of their day-to-day work. In the early stages of your career, that’s the way it should be. You should be focused on getting your specific piece of each project done, done well, and out the door.

You do not have to be a manager to be successful. Many people assume that the only path to more money and stature is managing a team. However, there are alternatives that will enable you to get a similar paycheck, have similar amounts of influence, and possibly be happier overall. Of course if you want to be a manager because you think you’ll love it, then absolutely pursue it. But even then, remember that you don’t have to be a manager forever. I’ve seen plenty of people go back to being individual contributors, then turn around and be managers again in their next job.

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.

Don’t worry that your team will outshine you. In fact, it’s your goal. You should always be training someone on your team to do your job. The better they are, the easier it is for you to move up and even start managing managers.

A truly great IC will be a leader in their chosen function and also become an informal cultural leader, someone who people across the company will seek out for advice and mentorship.

“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.

Despite the fact that many companies now rabidly test every single element of their product and unquestioningly follow the clicks, A/B and user testing is not product design. It’s a tool. A test. At best, a diagnosis. It can tell you something’s not working, but it won’t tell you how to fix it. Or it can show you an option that solves one hyperlocal issue but breaks something else downstream.

But the way I’ve gotten wealthy is not by accepting giant paychecks or titles to do jobs I know I’ll hate. I follow my curiosity and my passion. Always. And that’s meant leaving money on the table—so much money that people thought I might actually be crazy.

The key to finding them is networking. By that I don’t mean going to a conference and working the room, handing out your business cards or QR codes and cornering potential employers as they try to eat their stack of tiny sandwiches. I just mean make new relationships, beyond business—talk to people outside your bubble. Get to know what else is out there. Meet some new human beings. Networking is something you should be doing constantly—even when you’re happily employed.

The original Nest screwdriver let you choose from four different screwheads and fit neatly into the palm of your hand. It cost around $1.50 to make, so including it in every box was hugely controversial on a team that was focused on being lean and profitable. But the screwdriver’s friendly shape made installing the thermostat yourself seem less daunting, and it was so handy that it functioned as a marketing tool long after sale.

A vital part of the customer experience is post-sale. How do you stay connected to your customer in a way that’s actually useful? How do you keep on delighting people instead of just marketing to them, selling and selling until they’re sick of you?

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.

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.

Nobody can accurately estimate their time or all the steps they’ll need to perform. Trying to get into that much detail that far out is useless. Something will always spoil your plan. We were spending all our time scheduling, arguing over what could and couldn’t be done in a half day, and it was impossible to see the whole forest through the half trees.

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.

During this time, I’d also play a little game with myself and people I truly respected. They’d ask me, “What’s keeping you busy now? What’s interesting to you?” So I’d tell them I had an idea—maybe a great idea—and share a few details to get their reactions and thoughts and questions. I was developing my pitch, figuring out the story of the product just like Steve would do. Then as the weeks of research and strategy began to come together, I stopped saying it was an idea and started saying I was building a product. Even though it wasn’t quite true yet. But I wanted it to feel real—to get them, and especially me, to really dive to the details. I wanted to convince them and I wanted them to challenge it and I wanted to tell the story. To figure out if it held together.

It took me a decade to decide to build my first thermostat. Deciding to build a second version probably took a week.

Every failure is a learning experience. A complete meltdown is a PhD program.

Experienced people have a wealth of wisdom that they can pass on to the next generation and young people can push back against long-held assumptions. They can often see the opportunity that lies in accomplishing difficult things, while experienced people see only the difficulty.

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. Someone took a risk on you once. Someone guided you through your mistakes, took the time to help you grow. Not only is it your duty to create that moment for the next generation, but it’s also a good investment in the long-term success of your company.

Literally the only way to make a really good product is to dig in, analyze your customer’s needs, and explore all the possible options (including the unexpected ones: maybe I can work from home, maybe I can move closer to work). There are no perfect designs. There are always constraints. But you choose the best of all the options—aesthetically, functionally, and at the necessary price point.

Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.” If the messaging rings true, then the marketing is better. You don’t have to rely on bells and whistles, stunts, and dancing polar bears—you simply explain in the best way possible what you’re making and why you’re making it.

The reason is that marketing was part of the process from day one. Nobody was ignoring it, nobody was forgetting about it. We knew it was useful, so we used it.

If the product manager is the voice of the product, the project manager is the voice of the project—their job is to alert the team to potential problems that could stall or derail the project and to help find solutions.

He doesn’t just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. He can shake off his deep, geeky knowledge of the product and use it like a beginner, like a regular person. You’d be surprised how many product managers skip that hugely necessary step—listening to their customers, gaining insights, empathizing with their needs, then actually using the product in the real world. But for Joz, it’s the only way.

The thread that tied all these people and teams and pains and desires together was product management. For every successful product and company, all parts of your business end up leading back to them—it’s all hinged together in one central point. This is why product managers are the hardest people to hire and train. It’s why the great ones are so valuable and so beloved. Because they have to understand it all, make sense of it. And they do it alone. They’re one of the most important teams at a company and one of the smallest.