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.

And it’s not just tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who deserve some help. This book is for anyone who wants to create something new, who is chasing excellence, who doesn’t want to waste their precious time on this precious planet.

I’m going to talk a lot about building a great product, but a product doesn’t have to be a piece of technology. It can be anything you make—a

No matter how much you learn in school, you still need to get the equivalent of a PhD in navigating the rest of the world and building something meaningful.

You have to try and fail and learn by doing.

Understanding your customer—their demographics and psychographics, their wants and needs and pain points—is the foundation of your company. Your product, team, culture, sales, marketing, support, pricing—everything is shaped by that understanding.

I’m not saying this will work for everyone. Far from it. Everyone needs to find their own system. But you do need to prioritize your tasks, manage and organize your thoughts, and create a predictable schedule for your team to access those thoughts. And then you need to take a break. A real break.

Crisis You will encounter a crisis eventually. Everyone does. If you don’t, you’re not doing anything important or pushing any boundaries. When you’re creating something disruptive and new, you will at some point be blindsided by a complete disaster. It may be an external crisis that you have no control over, or an internal screwup or just the kinds of growing pains that hit every company. [See also: Chapter 5.2: Breakpoints.] Either way, when the time comes, here’s the basic playbook: 1. Keep your focus on how to fix the problem, not who to blame. That will come later and is far too distracting early on. 2. As a leader, you’ll have to get into the weeds. Don’t be worried about micromanagement—as the crisis unfolds your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it. However, very quickly after everyone has calmed down and gotten to work, let them do their jobs without you breathing down their necks. 3. Get advice. From mentors, investors, your board, or anyone else you know who’s gone through something similar. Don’t try to solve your problems alone. 4. Your job once people get over the initial shock will be constant communication. You need to talktalktalk (with your team, the rest of the company, the board, investors, and potentially press and customers) and listenlistenlisten (hear what your team is worried about and the issues that are bubbling up, calm down panicked employees and stressed-out PR people). Don’t worry about overcommunicating. 5. It doesn’t matter if ...

Marketing does not have to be soft and hand-wavy. While good marketing is anchored in human connection and empathy, creating and implementing your marketing programs can and should be a rigorous and analytical process. 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. As you build, you should continue to use marketing to evolve the story and ensure they have a voice in what the product becomes. 2. Use marketing to prototype your product narrative. The creative team can help you make the product narrative tangible. This should happen in parallel with product development—one should feed the other. 3. The product is the brand. The actual experience a customer has with your product will do far more to cement your brand in their heads than any advertising you can show them. Marketing is part of every customer touchpoint whether you realize it or not. 4. Nothing exists in a vacuum. You can’t just make an ad and think you’re done. The ad leads to a website that sends you to a store where you purchase a box that contains a guide that helps you with installation, after which you’re greeted by a welcome email. The entire experience has to be designed together, with different touchpoints explaining different parts of your messaging to create a consistent, cohesive experience. 5. The best marketing is just telling the truth. The ultimate job of marketing is to ...

Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.” If the messaging rings true, then the marketing is better.

messaging architecture: Fig. 5.4.1 This is the template we created at Nest that I’ve now passed along to endless startups.

First you break down the pain points that your customer is feeling or has habituated away. Each pain is a “why”—it gives your product a reason to exist. The painkiller is the “how”—these are the features that will solve the customer’s problem. The “I want it” column explains the emotions that your customers are feeling. The “I need it” column covers the rational reasons to buy this product. The whole product narrative should be in there—every pain, every painkiller, every rational and emotional impulse, every insight about your customer.

It needs to encompass everything because: It’s essential for product development: Product management and marketing work on the messaging architecture from day one. In order to build a great product, each pain has to be extremely well understood and answered with a painkiller in the form of a product feature. The messaging architecture is a sister text to the plain list of features and their functionality that makes up your basic product messaging. Both need to exist side by side: the what and the why. It’s a living document: As the product and your team’s understanding of the customer evolve, so does the messaging architecture. It’s a shared resource: Everyone who is responsible for any customer touchpoints should be looking at this document, not just marketing. It should steer engineering, sales, and support as well. Every single team should be thinking about the what, the why, and the story you’re telling.

The messaging activation matrix should guide where and when you include certain information so you don’t overwhelm or undereducate your customer as they move through multiple touchpoints along the consumer journey.

It wasn’t micromanagement—it was care.

I wanted the marketing team to be as exacting as the engineering and manufacturing teams—to

marketing prototyped the product narrative in parallel with product development. The clearest expression of that was the Why We Made It page on nest.com.

We literally took the “why” at the heart of thermostat product development and slapped it on the front page of our website. One of the first tabs on nest.com was called “Why we made it”—that’s where we connected directly with a skeptical audience, where we injected the virus of doubt.

It took weeks to get this page written.

Marketing was always there, ensuring that we still had a strong answer to “Why We Made It”

“Why We Made It”

Product marketing and product management are essentially the same thing—or at least they should be.

A product manager’s responsibility is to figure out what the product should do and then create the spec (the description of how it will work) as well as the messaging (the facts you want customers to understand). Then they work with almost every part of the business (engineering, design, customer support, finance, sales, marketing, etc.) to get the product spec’d, built, and brought to market.

But, 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.

When yet another CEO tells me they have no idea what a product manager does, it always makes me think of design in the eighties. Because most tech companies in the eighties didn’t have designers.

the founder or team lead often plays the role of the product manager in the beginning. They define the vision and work with all parts of the business to make it a reality. The trouble comes when the team grows—to 40, 50, 100 people. [See also: Chapter 5.2: Breakpoints.] That’s when the leader has to step away from the day-to-day business of building the product and hand over the reins to someone else. But they can’t imagine handing over their baby. How could anyone understand it or love it or help it grow as well as they could? And how would that function even work? Where would it live? How could the founder retain influence over the product if they’re no longer the manager of that product? And then what would the founder’s job even be? [See also: Chapter 6.1: Becoming CEO.] The same thing happens at big companies. They’re also flummoxed. The engineers figure out what to build or the sales team tells them what customers need. Where does product management fit in?

And the reason for it is simple: the customer needs a voice on the team. Engineers like to build products using the coolest new technology. Sales wants to build products that will make them a lot of money. But the product manager’s sole focus and responsibility is to build the right products for their customers. That’s the job.

Product management is less a well-defined role and more a set of skills.

It lives between everything, a white space that morphs based on the customer, the needs of the business, and the abilities of the humans involved.

A good product manager will do a little of everything and a great deal of all this: Spec out what the product should do and the road map for where it will go over time. Determine and maintain the messaging matrix. Work with engineering to get the product built according to spec. Work with design to make it intuitive and attractive to the target customer. Work with marketing to help them understand the technical nuances in order to develop effective creative to communicate the messaging. Present the product to management and get feedback from the execs. Work with sales and finance to make sure this product has a market and can eventually make money. Work with customer support to write necessary instru...

Product managers look for places where the cust...

They unravel issues as they go, discovering the root of the problem and working w...

They do whatever is necessary to move projects forward—that could be taking notes in meetings or triaging bugs or summarizing customer feedback or organizing team docs or sitting down with designers and sketching somethin...

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing writes the messaging—the facts you want to communicate to customers—and gets the product sold. But from my experience that’s a grievous mistake. Those are, and should always be, one job.

There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained—the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning.

the superpower of every truly great product manager—is empathy.

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.

Figuring out what should be built and why is the hardest part of building.

Product management can’t just throw a spec over the fence to the rest of the team—every part of the business should be involved. That doesn’t mean the product manager should build by consensus, but engineering, marketing, finance, sales, customer support, and legal will all have ideas and useful insights that will help shape the narrative before the product is built. And they’ll continue to improve that narrative as the product evolves.

A spec and messaging aren’t instructions that are set in stone. They flex and change, shifting as new ideas are introduced, or new realities slap you in the face. Building a product isn’t like assembling an IKEA chair. You can’t just hand people instructions and walk away. Building a product is like making a song. 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. They’re the only person who can see and hear how all the pieces are coming together, so they can tell when there’s too much bassoon or when a drum sol...

Their job isn’t to be CEO of the product—or, God forbid, what some companies c...

Mostly they empower the team.

They help everyone understand the context of what the customer needs, then work together to make the right choices.

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

product manager has to be a master negotiator and communicator.

They have to influence people without managing them.

They have to ask questions and listen and use their superpower—empathy for the customer, empathy for the team—to ...

They have to escalate if someone needs to play bad cop, but know they can’t p...

They have to know what to fight for and which battles should be s...

They have to pop up in meetings all over the company where teams are representing their own interests—their schedules, their needs, their issues—and ...