Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

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.

What you do matters. Where you work matters. Most importantly, who you work with and learn from matters. 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.

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.

As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. 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.

It helps to agree on the process early. To define it up front—here’s our product development process, here’s our design process, our marketing process, our sales process. Here’s our schedule and how we work and how we work together. Everyone—manager and team—signs off on it and then the manager has to let go. They let the team work.

I started reading management books and realized that a great deal of management comes down to how you manage your own fears and anxieties.

The key for me was separating the problems of the company from my personal issues, identifying when my own actions were causing frustrations on the team versus knowing that some things were entirely out of my control.

Before I learned to create a little distance between what I felt and what I needed to express at work, I let too many of my worries and fears leak into my voice and into my daily interactions.

You have to tell the team why. Why am I this passionate? Why is this mission meaningful? Why is this small detail so important that I’m flipping out right now when nobody else seems to think it matters? Nobody wants to follow someone who throws themselves at windmills for no reason. To get people to join you, to truly become a team, to fill them with the same energy and drive that’s bubbling within you, you need to tell them the why.

If you don’t have enough data to make a decision, you’ll need insights to inform your opinion. Insights can be key learnings about your customers or your market or your product space—something substantial that gives you an intuitive feeling for what you should do. You can also get outside input: talk to the experts and confer with your team. You won’t reach consensus, but hopefully you’ll be able to form a gut instinct. Listen to it and take responsibility for what comes next.

You need a hypothesis, and that hypothesis should be part of a bigger product vision. So you can A/B test where the “Buy” button should go on a Web page, whether it should be blue or orange, but you shouldn’t be testing whether or not a customer should buy online. If you’re testing the core of your product, if the basic functionality can flex and change depending on the whims of an A/B test, then there is no core. There’s a hole where your product vision should be and you’re just shoveling data into the void.

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.

So she did the only thing you can do when faced with a controlling asshole: Kill ’em with kindness. Ignore them. Try to get around them. Quit. In that order.

If you’re going to get everyone’s attention, make sure it’s to support the mission, not for personal gain. Think through the problems that are plaguing your project. Write down thoughtful, insightful solutions. Present them to leadership. Those solutions may not work, but the process will be at the very least educational. Don’t nag, but be persistent, choose your moment wisely, be professional, and don’t hold back about the consequences if you don’t succeed. Tell them you’re passionate about making this job work, but if you can’t solve these issues then you’ll probably quit.

Your story about why you left needs to be honest and fair and your story for your next job needs to be inspiring: this is what I want to learn, this is the kind of team I want to work with, this is part of the mission that truly excites me.

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.”

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.

Each team’s heartbeat will be different—it could be six-week sprints or weekly reviews or daily check-ins. It could be scrum or waterfall or kanban, whatever organizational framework or project management approach works for you. A creative team is going to have a very different heartbeat than an engineering team; a company that makes hardware is going to have slower team rhythms than companies that only push around electrons. It doesn’t matter what that heartbeat is, your job is to keep it steady so your team knows what’s expected of them.

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.

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 is right for it to exist, whether the market for it will be tiny or enormous.

the latter usually fails. Throwing darts at a wall is not how you pick a great idea. Anything worth doing takes time. Time to understand. Time to prepare. Time to get it right. You can fast-track a lot of things and skimp on others, but you cannot cheat time.

You can only have one customer. The bulk of your focus and the whole of your branding should be for consumers or business—not both. 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. For the vast majority of businesses, losing sight of the main customer you’re building for is the beginning of the end.

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 the crisis was caused by your mistake or your team or a fluke accident: accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize.

There is always a temptation to obfuscate or couch everything in legalese—to say “mistakes were made” but never admit they were yours. This will not work. People will figure it out. And they will be pissed. If something is your fault, tell them what you did. Tell them what you’ve learned from it. And tell them how you’ll prevent it from ever happening again. No evading, blaming, or making excuses. Just accept responsibility and be a grown-up.

Once you assess someone thoroughly, check references, and decide to hire them—you also have to decide to trust them. You can’t start with zero trust and expect someone to prove themselves to you. Whenever you’re embarking on any journey—a new employee, a new job, a new partnership—you have to believe it’ll work. Believe that people will do right by you. Of course, there will be disappointments—some people will knock your trust down to 90 percent, to 50 percent, to zero—but if you let that keep you from trusting others, you’ll never know the relationships and opportunities you missed.

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

A team can easily work together until about fifteen people. Informal conversation flows naturally, team meetings happen when they absolutely have to, nobody really pays attention to the org chart and it has no impact on how information moves around the business. In those early days, you should try to keep the org as flat as possible for as long as possible, but you’ll need to add a management layer when one person has to manage more than eight to twelve people.

Lack of transparency from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom can breed distrust. Where there’s a lack of data, distrust fills that void.

And make every team write down how they do things: What’s the marketing process? What’s the engineering process? What are the phases for how we make a product? How do we work together? It can’t just be left in people’s brains. People leave. New people join. If you’re growing geometrically—in all directions at once—then you need a strong, stable core at the center. Your experienced employees have to be able to walk new employees through how you do what you do, or else everyone gets lost.

The best marketing is just telling the truth. The ultimate job of marketing is to find the very best way to tell the true story of your product.

Finding the best, most honest expression of a product or feature is not easy. That’s why there’s an entire team devoted to it. Product management can create the messaging—the top features, the problem statement—but finding the best way to tell that story to customers is an art. It’s a science. It’s marketing.

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. They ensure that it stays true to its original intent and doesn’t get watered down along the way. 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.

The tricky thing is that the responsibilities of a product manager are completely different at different companies. 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.

Product managers look for places where the customer is unhappy. They unravel issues as they go, discovering the root of the problem and working with the team to solve it. 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 something out or meeting with engineering and digging into the code. It’s different for every product.

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.

Figuring out what should be built and why is the hardest part of building. And it’s impossible to do it alone. 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.

Sometimes they’ll have the final opinion, sometimes they’ll have to say “no,” sometimes they’ll have to direct from the front. But that should be rare. 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 good product manager.

So the 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 build bridges and mend road maps. They have to escalate if someone needs to play bad cop, but know they can’t play that card too often. They have to know what to fight for and which battles should be saved for another day. 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 stand alone, advocating for the customer.

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 slide. They’re incredibly rare. Incredibly precious. And they can and will help your business go exactly where it needs to go.

Rather than focusing on rewarding salespeople immediately after a transaction, vest the commission over time so your sales team is incentivized to not only bring in new customers, but also work with existing customers to ensure they’re happy and stay happy. Build a culture based on relationships rather than transactions.

Every sale should be a team sale. So if you have a customer success team (the team that actually delivers, sets up, and maintains whatever is sold to the customer), then it should sign off on every deal. Sales and customer success should be under one leader, in the same silo, being compensated in the same way. In this setup, sales can’t just throw a customer over the fence and never think about them again. If there’s no customer success team, then sales should work very closely with customer support, operations, or manufacturing—create a board of people to approve each commitment.

The best salespeople are the ones who maintain relationships even if it means not making money that day. Those are the salespeople you want on your team. Because if you do it right, they truly will become part of the team, rather than mercenaries who swoop in, make their money, then jump ship to the next hot company, leaving a trail of problems behind them.

And nobody ever works a sale alone. During the sales process, the salesperson has backup from customer success or support or whoever will be working closely with the customer post-sale. And then those teams sign off on the deal. There are never any surprises—everyone knows exactly what’s expected of them to make this new customer successful. And once the deal is closed, the salesperson doesn’t disappear. They stay on as a point of contact for that customer, and if there’s any kind of issue, they step in to resell them.

People have this vision of what it’s like to be an executive or CEO or leader of a huge business unit. They assume everyone at that level has enough experience and savvy to at least appear to know what they’re doing. They assume there’s thoughtfulness and strategy and long-term thinking and reasonable deals sealed with firm handshakes. But some days, it’s high school. Some days, it’s kindergarten.

Culture is incredibly sticky. I should have remembered that. Larry, with Bill Campbell’s prodding, wanted Nest to come in and shift Google’s entire way of thinking, to give it a burst of startup mojo. But culture doesn’t work that way—you can’t repaint an old factory and show the workers a training video and think you’ve made any kind of difference. You have to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it again. Most people and companies need a near-death experience before they can really change.

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.

Even if your product doesn’t change the whole world, even if it has a modest scope and a smaller audience, it can still change an industry. Do something different. Shift customer expectations. Set the standard higher. It can make a market, a whole ecosystem, better.