Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

They have to tell the story of the customer, make sure ...

The customer story helped engineering understand the pain point. They built a product to address that pain. Then marketing crafted a narrative that gave every person who had experienced the pain a reason to buy the product. The thread that tied all these people and teams and pains and desires together was product management.

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.

Because the needs of each product and company are so different, these are incredibly difficult jobs to describe (See also: the previous three thousand words), never mind actually hire for. There’s no set job description or even a proper set of requirements.

As long as they have a solid basic understanding of the technology and the curiosity to learn more, they can figure out how to work with engineering to get it built.

There’s no four-year college degree for product management, no obvious source you can hire from. Amazing product managers usually emerge from other roles. They start in marketing or engineering or support, but because they care so deeply about the customer, they start fixing the product and working to redefine it, rather than just executing someone else’s spec or messaging. And their focus on the customer doesn’t cloud their understanding that ultimately this is a business—so they also dive into sales and ops, try to understand unit economics and pricing. They create the experience they need to become great product managers.

This person is a needle in a haystack. An almost impossible combination of structured thinker and visionary leader, with incredible passion but also firm follow-through, who’s a vibrant people person but fascinated by technology, an incredible communicator who can work with engineering and think through marketing and not forget the business model, the economics, profitability, PR. They have to be pushy but with a smile, to know when to hold fast and when to let one sli...

There are generally three kinds of CEOs: 1. Babysitter CEOs are stewards of the company and are focused on keeping it safe and predictable. They generally oversee the growth of existing products that they inherited and don’t take risks that might scare executives or shareholders. This invariably leads to the stagnation and deterioration of companies. Most public company CEOs are babysitters. 2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove. 3. Incompetent CEOs are usually either simply inexperienced or founders who are ill-suited to lead a company after it reaches a certain size. They are not up to the task of being either a babysitter or a parent, so the company suffers.

The job is to give a shit. To care. About everything.

If you want to build a great company, you should expect excellence from every part of it.

The output of every team can make or break the customer experience, so they should all be a priority.

There can’t be any functions that you dismiss as secondary—where you casually accept mediocrity because it doesn’t really matter. Everything matters. And it’s not just about you.

When you truly give a shit, you care, you don’t let up until you’re satisfied, you pick things apart until they’re great.

People will hand you something that they worked on tirelessly for weeks, that they’ve thought through and are proud of, that’s 90 percent amazing. And you will tell them to go back and make it better. Your team will be shocked, stunned, possibly even dejected. They’ll say it’s already so good, we’ve worked so hard. You’ll say good enough is not good enough. So they’ll march out the door and do it again. And, if necessary, again. They might get so tangled up that it’ll be simpler to just start from scratch. But with each iteration, each new version, each regroup and reimagining, they’ll discover something new. Something great. Something better.

Most people are happy with 90 percent good. Most leaders will take pity on their teams and just let it slide. But going from 90 ...

So you push. Yourself. The team. You push people to discover how great they can be. You push until they start pushing back. In these moments, always err on the side of almost-too-much. Keep pushing until you find out if what you’re asking for is actually impossible or just a whole lot of work. Get to the point of pain so you start to see when the pain is becoming real. That’s when you back down and find a new middle ground.

It’s not easy. But all that attention, that care, the quest for perfection—they’ll raise the team’s own standards. What they expect of themselves. After a while, they’ll work incredibly hard not just to make you happy, but because they know how much pride they feel when they do world-class work. The entire culture will evolve to expect excellence from each other. So your job is to care.

You’re the top of the pyramid. Your focus, your passion, trickles down. If you don’t give a shit about marketing, you’ll get shitty marketing. If you don’t care about desig...

Don’t rack your brain trying to decide which parts of your company need your attention and which don’t. They all do. You can prioritize...

It didn’t matter if this team was building internal tools that customers would never see. The company depended on those tools, and internal customers should be treated as well as external ones. So I listened closely, gave them my full attention (don’t be checking your phone or computer), and helped them move past their roadblocks.

You don’t have to be an expert in everything. You just have to care about it.

The other commonalities of successful leaders are just as straightforward: They hold people (and themselves) accountable and drive for results. They’re hands-on, but to a point. They know when to back off and delegate. They can keep an eye on the long-term vision while still being eyeball-deep in details. They’re constantly learning, always interested in new opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new people. And they do it because they’re engaged and curious, not because those things may end up making them money. If they screw up, they admit to it and own their mistakes. They’re not afraid to make hard decisions, even when they know people will be upset and angry. They (mostly) know themselves. They have a clear view of both their strengths and challenges. They can tell the difference between an opinion- and data-driven decision and act accordingly. [See also: Chapter 2.2: Data Versus Opinion.] They realize that nothing should be theirs, even if the genesis was with them. It all has to be the team’s. The company’s. They know their job is to jubilantly celebrate everyone else’s successes, to make sure they get credit for them, and hold little for themselves. They listen. To their team, to their customers, to their board, to their mentors. They pay attention to the opinions and thoughts of the people around them and adjust their views when they get new information from sources they trust.

Great leaders can recognize good ideas even if those ideas didn’t come out of their own mouths. They know that good ideas are everywhere. They’re in everyone.

the brain patterns of entrepreneurs thinking about their startups are extremely similar to those of parents thinking about their children.

As a parent you never stop worrying about your kid, planning for your kid, pushing your kid to do better, be better. A parent’s job isn’t to be friends with their kids all the time—it’s to build them into independent, thoughtful humans who will be ready and able to thrive in the world one day without their parents. Kids often resent them for it. Cry, slam doors, wail in anguish when you make them turn off the TV, get their homework done, get a job. But you can’t be a good parent if you’re worried about your kid being mad at you. Sometimes your kid won’t like you. Sometimes your employees won’t, either. Sometimes they’ll hate your guts. I remember walking into meetings and everyone rolling their eyes and sighing. I could see it on their faces, “Oh fuck, here we go again.” They knew I was going to keep harping on that one thing that everyone was sick and tired of hearing about. That one thing that was already 90 percent great and that would be so much work to change—too much work—but that I knew in my gut was the right thing for our customers. It’s not a great feeling, having twenty people look at you like that. Like you’re being ridiculous, unreasonable. Like what you want is impossible.

He learned from the screwups, was constantly improving, and his good ideas, his successes, totally wiped away his failures.

He was constantly pushing the company to learn and try new things. That’s how he earned the team’s respect. Even when the product took a turn, a huge pile of extra work fell on everyone’s shoulders and we knew Steve wouldn’t delay the schedule by a millisecond. It drove us crazy, but the team respected his dedication to getting it right. In this job, respect is always more important than being liked. You can’t please everyone. Trying can be ruinous.

CEOs have to make incredibly unpopular decisions—lay people off, kill projects, rearrange teams. Often you’ll have to take decisive action, hurt people to save the company, to cut out a cancer. You can’t s...

Delaying hard decisions, hoping problems will resolve themselves, or keeping pleasant but incompetent people on the team might make you feel better. It may give you the illusion of niceness. But it chips away at the company, bit by bit, and erodes the team’s respect for you. It turns you into a babysitter. And kids may like the babysitter at first—it’s nice to go to the local park, to watch movies and eat pizza. It’s fun for a while. But eventually kids want to go further, do more. They want to go skateboarding. They want to explore. So they might start testing their boundaries to see what they can get away with. They might roll their eyes when the babysitter tells them what to do. Because a babysitter is not a parent. All ...

When your team knows too much about you as a person, not just you as a CEO, they start dissecting your personal life to try to understand your decisions. Your motivations. Your ways of thinking. That’s not only a distracting waste of time, it’s counterproductive.

So it’s wise to stand alone—not to let anyone at work get too close. Even if you wish you could just grab a drink with your team like you used to. It’s a cliché to say “It’s lonely at the top.” But it’s also true.

Most people assume being CEO is a hard job—stressful, busy, high-pressure. But the stress is one thing; the isolation is another.

This job can suck you dry if you let it. It can also be one of the most liberating experiences of your life. Since I was a kid, I tried to convince people to follow my crazy ideas. I spent so much time and energy and emotion desperately trying to get them to do things differently. The crazier the idea, the more it cut against the grain, the longer and harder I had to fight for it. And so often the answer I got was no. No. Not right now. Long before Apple got into the game, I pitched the concept for an early iPod-like MP3 player to RealNetworks, Swatch, Palm. Everyone turned it down. No. No. Maybe we’ll consider it next quarter. Maybe next year. But when you’re CEO, you’re in charge. Sure, you’re constrained by money or resources or your board, but for the first time there are no constraints on your ideas. You get to finally test out the things that other people told you couldn’t be done. It’s your opportunity to put your money where your mouth is. That freedom is thrilling and empowering and utterly terrifying.

There is nothing scarier than finally getting what you want and having to take responsibility for it, good or bad. And the tables begin to turn—as CEO you can’t say “yes” to everything. You have to become the one who says “no.” Freedom is a double-edged sword. But it’s still a sword. You can use it to cut through the bullshit, the hesitation, the red tape, the habituation. You can use it to create whatever you want. The right way. Your way. You can change things. That’s why you start a company. That’s why you become CEO.

Because a handful of founder CEOs have become famous and mind-bogglingly rich, there’s this myth that the transition between starting a company and running it through all its phases, good and bad, is natural. Inevitable. If you create a startup, of course you’re going to stick with it as it blossoms into a real company, then a corporation. Isn’t that the whole point? But a startup with five smart friends is a completely different beast than a company of 100, never mind 1,000. The job and responsibilities of an early founder and later-stage CEO are polar opposites.

There is a real shortage of talent—especially smart, dedicated talent in the CEO chair—so if you want to go there again, don’t think you can’t.

There’s a half-life to everything. 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. The first three to six months will creep by as you get over the initial shock, the denial and possibly anger, the gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair when you see what they’re doing to your baby. It will also take you that long to get through the list of crap you’ve been meaning to do but had been ignoring because of work. Only after you exhaust that list can you stop getting distracted by the past and start getting bored. This is a necessary step. You absolutely need to get bored before you can find new things to be inspired by. It will take another six months to start reengaging with the world. To stop caring quite as much about what went wrong. To start learning new things, finding your curiosity again. Then for the next six months you can begin to look at your life with fresh eyes. Get distracted. Get excited. Start thinking about what’s next.

In the end, there are two things that matter: products and people. What you build and who you build it with.

The things you make—the ideas you chase and the ideas that chase you—will ultimately define your career. And the people you chase them with may define your life.

It’s incredibly special to create something together with a team. From nothing, from chaos, from a spark in someone’s head, t...

If everything aligns, if the timing is right, if you get incredibly lucky, you’ll fight to create a product you believe in, that has so much of you and your team bottled inside it, and it will sell. It will spread. It won’t just solve your customers’ pain points; it will give them superpowers. If you make something truly disruptive, truly impactful, it will take ...

Your product, this thing you create together with your team, can eclipse your wildest expectations. Or, then again, maybe it won’t. Maybe it will fail.

Success is not a guarantee. No matter how great your team. How good your intentions. How wonderful your product. Sometimes it will all fall apart.

The thing holding most people back is themselves. They think they know what they can do and who they’re supposed to be, and they don’t explore beyond those boundaries. That is, until someone comes along and pushes them—willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily—into doing something more. Into discovering a well of creativity or willpower or brilliance that they never realized they had.

Humans are the same way. But so many of us get stuck at V1. Once we settle into ourselves, we lose sight of what we can become. But just as products are never finished, neither are humans. We’re constantly changing. Constantly evolving. So you push. As a leader, a CEO, a mentor—you push even when people resent you for it. Even when you worry that maybe you’ve pushed too far . . . But there’s always a reward on the other side.

It’s worth it to do things well. It’s worth it to try for greatness. It’s worth it to help your team, to help people.