More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tony Fadell
Read between
July 23 - August 25, 2024
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.
“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.”
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.
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. Nobody can quite imagine walking into a party or the office with these weird ugly glasses on their face, creepily filming everyone around them. And even if there’s a brilliant vision for the future of AR glasses, the technology can’t deliver it yet and the social stigma will take a long time to dissolve. I’m convinced it’ll happen, but
...more
On the other hand, take Uber. The founders started with a customer problem—a problem they experienced in their daily lives—then applied technology. The problem was simple: finding a cab in Paris was next to impossible and hiring private drivers was expensive and took forever. In the days before smartphones, the solution might have been to simply start a new kind of taxi or limo business. But the company’s timing was perfect—the sudden ubiquity of smartphones provided Uber with a platform and put customers into the right mindset to accept their solution. If I can order a toaster with an app on
...more
“You do get a broad cut at companies but it’s very thin. It’s like a picture of a banana: you might get a very accurate picture but it’s only two dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends—I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes—but you never really taste it.”
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.
You’re a pebble bouncing off an elephant. But you’ll be a well-paid pebble eating free kale chips, so if you do go that route enjoy the paycheck while working on your tiny piece of some vast and endless project.
But don’t get stuck between the elephant’s toes so you can never see the whole beast.
The CEO and executive team are mostly staring way out on the horizon—50 percent of their time is spent planning for a fuzzy, distant future months or years away, 25 percent is focused on upcoming milestones in the next month or two, and the last 25 percent is spent putting out fires happening right now at their
I’d actually first encountered Audible when I was building the Nino. They were about to launch their own device, but they weren’t particularly excited about it. They didn’t want to build hardware but knew they needed it to demonstrate the content marketplace they wanted to become.
When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for human beings.
A lot of engineers only trust other engineers. Just like finance people only trust finance people. People like people who think like them.
Too many geeks in one room geeking out.
But I wanted to understand the squishy stuff and the geeky stuff. And I liked all of it. I could also translate back and forth—explain the squish to engineers, translate the 1s and 0s to the creatives. I could synthesize all the pieces and keep the whole company in my head.
Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. 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.
The level of detail that was expected at Apple
If either of you is nervous, you can start the conversation with something positive, ease into it, but don’t ignore the elephant in the room, don’t tiptoe around the reason you need to talk.
Don't ignore the elephant in the room
If you’re a manager—congratulations, you’re now a parent. Not because you should treat your employees like children, but because it’s now your responsibility to help them work through failure and find success.
But even with A/B testing, we probably would have gotten the same muddled results, the same product-killing fear of making the wrong decision.
Storytelling is how you get people to take a leap of faith to do something new. It’s what all our big choices ultimately come down to—believing a story we tell ourselves or that someone else tells us.
Nothing in the world is ever 100 percent sure. Even scientific research with entirely data-based outcomes is actually filled with caveats—we
clear: hating your job is never worth the money.
But it was as if he’d just gotten out of prison. He’d never talked to anyone outside of Steve’s sphere of influence. He didn’t know who to go to, how to raise money. His only relationship to the world was through Apple, and once he left he was clueless. He figured it out, of course, eventually. But it took so much longer than he expected.
So, don't get trapped
Even if you hate your job, don’t leave it in a tangle of loose ends.
had a nine-month transition out of Google Nest. At Apple, it took twenty months.
People won’t remember how you started. They’ll remember how you left.
But don’t let that deter you from making the choice...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If you’re going to get everyone’s attention, make sure it’s to support the mission, not for personal gain.
A two-page résumé can tell the story of a three-hundred-page novel once you know what you’re looking for. And too many plots have giant holes in them. So before you quit, you’d better have a story. A good, credible, and factual one. You’ll need to have a rationale for why you left. And you’ll need one for why you want to join whatever company you’re heading to next.
Your story about why you left needs to be honest and fair and your story for your next job needs to be inspiring:
He knew damn well that I deserved a higher title from the start, that he’d stiffed me on the way in (you can read the full story in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, if you’re curious). But now I had delivered. I’d overdelivered.
At the time Apple’s market cap was around $4 billion. Microsoft’s was $250 billion. Apple was dying. But Fuse was dying faster. So I took the job.
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.
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.
Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.
But we weren’t paying enough attention to what was probably the most important part of the customer experience: the app on your phone. The team figured it was simple—just an app. We’d made an early prototype in 2011 when we’d first started thinking about the experience, but then didn’t return to it, didn’t revise it as the thermostat evolved.
70% of the customer experience was on people’s phones or laptops:
We needed to look through their eyes to understand why the man might pick up the box. And so we could convince the woman to keep it.
Nest
Over time we added more personas—couples, families, roommates—as we better understood our customers.
That’s how prototyping works. It’s how you make abstract concepts into physical representations. You turn your messaging architecture into words and pictures on a box.
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?
And it helped people discover us. Journalists wrote articles about the screwdriver. It appeared in every five-star review. It was free PR,
It became a symbol for the entire user experience—thoughtful, elegant, long-lived, and deeply useful.
COGS (cost of goods sold)
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.”
You can’t just hit customers on the head with the “what” before you tell them the “why.”
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.
The virus of doubt
Steve was a master of this. Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it. And he made it all look so natural, so easy.
It never felt like a speech. It felt like a conversation. Like a story. And the reason is simple: Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it.
You can earn their trust by showing that you really know your stuff or understand their needs. Or offer them something useful; connect with them in a new way so they feel assured that they’re making the right choice with your company. You tell them a story they can connect with.
