Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

The actual experience a customer has with your product will do far more to cement your brand

Marketing is part of every customer touchpoint whether you realize it or not.

The best marketing is just telling the truth.

to tell the true story of your product.

Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.”

To make the story feel real, to make it tangible, you need to visualize it.

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.

I learned storytelling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak.

Building a product is like making a song.

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.

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.

Most lawyers excel at two things: saying “no” (or “maybe”) and billing you.

Law firms are generally all about billable hours.

in the end Steve ended up making the business decision to settle. In fact he settled for $100 million, tens of millions more than Creative had asked for. He wanted them completely out of our hair, never to return.

It was an interesting lesson in what winning meant. It wasn’t a proper legal victory—we never defended ourselves, never went to court—but it was a win for Steve. It was more important for him to never spend another second of his life worrying about this lawsuit than to save money or face.

I had seen too many successful products and platforms from little startups die when bigger players moved in and sucked up all the oxygen in the room.

But the worst part was the bullshitting. I started getting allergic to the word “thoughtful.”

Larry told me not to worry about firing everyone. He said there were plenty of open jobs at Google that they could easily move into. And I thought, Has this guy ever had to personally lay off people in his life? You can’t just play with people’s lives like that.

The bankers asked Larry if he’d sell to Amazon and he said, “Yeah, I think I would.” I was shocked again—sell to one of their competitors? It felt like another slap in the face.

As talks moved forward, I stuck to my word. I left Nest. Walked away from our marriage. They said they wanted a divorce so I gave them a divorce.

And then, months after I left, Google changed their mind. Again. They decided not...

But there was no denying that the flip-flopping was painful—for our customers, for the team, for their families. Executive management seemed to have an utter disregard for our employees and the work they were trying to achieve.

Maybe it was all an elaborate game of chicken to get me to toe the line and cut costs.

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.

All these jobs felt incredibly different, but at their core the responsibilities were the same—it was less and less about what you were making and more about who you were making it with.

As CEO, you spend almost all your time on people problems and communication. You’re trying to navigate a tangled web of professional relationships and intrigues, listen to but also ignore your board,

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.

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.

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.

And just because you’re in charge does not mean you’re in control.

There’s always some new crisis, some new people problem, someone quitting, someone complaining, someone falling apart.

When you’re a manager, you can look at the collective achievement of your team and feel a sense of accomplishment and pride. When you’re a CEO, you dream that maybe, ten years down the road, some people will think you did a good job. But you can never tell how you’re doing in the moment. You can never sit back and look at a job well done.

With great CEOs the meeting is smooth as butter. Watching Steve Jobs in an Apple board meeting was like watching a master conductor direct an orchestra. There was no confusion, no conflict.

The famous Tolstoy line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” applies to boards as well. Happy, functional, effective boards are all relatively small, full of experienced operators who have built companies before, think of themselves as mentors and coaches, and actually do the work—they

Bad boards come in all shapes and sizes and screw up in a million different ways.

One of the most painful parts of the Google acquisition of Nest was losing our board.

When we were acquired, our beloved board was dissolved and replaced with . . . nothing.

When Apple was thinking about getting into retail for the first time, neither Steve Jobs nor anybody else on the board knew how to do it. So they brought on Mickey Drexler, the CEO of GAP.

The best board members are mentors first.

That’s why Jeff Bezos once told me never to join anyone else’s board. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “I’m only going to be on the board of my company and my philanthropy. That’s it!” I think of him every time I decline another board seat.

One of the best things about sitting on the board of a rising company is that you can get an early look into consumer behavior or new trends or disruptions.

Public board members can get sued by shareholders. They have to go to countless committee meetings for audits, compensation, or governance. If things go sideways, they might get hammered in the press.

that culture is enabled and driven by the fact that Google’s search and advertising business pretty much prints cash. Even Googlers call it the “Money Tree.”

Then, within hours of the acquisition, we had to fight for our customers. When they heard Google was buying Nest, customers panicked that they were going to be served ads on their thermostats. Newspapers shouted that Google would track your family, your pets, your schedule in their endless lust for data.

within hours of the acquisition, we had to fight for our customers. When they heard Google was buying Nest, customers panicked that they were going to be served ads on their thermostats. Newspapers shouted that Google would track your family, your pets, your schedule in their endless lust for data. So together, Google and Nest immediately put out a statement:

Nest immediately put out a statement: “Nest is being run independently from the rest of Google, with a separate management team, brand and culture. For example, Nest has a paid-for business model, while Google has generally had an ad-supported business model. We have nothing against ads—after all, Nest does lot...

“Nest is being run independently from the rest of Google, with a separate management team, brand and culture. For example, Nest has a paid-for business model, while Google has generally had an ad-supported business model. We have nothing against ads—after all, Nest does lots of ad...

It was the right thing to do for our customers. It was exactly the wrong thing to do for ou...