Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

We tried to cross-pollinate different people from different groups, a good mix from around the company. No managers, no executives, no keynote presentations.

Any employee could come to five lunches a year. And each lunch was a cultural inoculation, a vaccine against indifference and apathy, against thinking that what you do doesn’t matter and that nobody at the top knows who you are. And

Sometimes it will turn out that the people you hired early aren’t right for the team as you grow. Or sometimes you hired the wrong people right out of the gate.

Or you hired mediocre people. Or you hired people who weren’t a good fit for your culture, despite being spectacular otherwise.

Sometimes you hire people who just won’t be successful at your company. And the...

You have to quickly move from “this isn’t working” to “now I’m going to do everything I can to help you find a job you like that’s better for you.” It’s counterintuitive, but firing someone from a job they’re failing at and utterly unsuited to can be a surprisingly positive experience.

If you’re leading a company or a large org, it is your responsibility to help people identify their challenge areas and give them space and coaching to get better

Then again, sometimes you realize you hired an asshole. An asshole at a tiny startup can be the end of the startup.

If you’re managing a petty, untrustworthy tyrant, then the knee-jerk reaction will be to cut that cancer out as fast as possible. But you’ll still have to take your time—tell them the situation, give them an opportunity to turn it around.

But more often the real shock of growth is that over time you’ll bring on people who are just okay. Relative to the amazing people you brought in early, they’ll seem unimpressive. Mostly fine, good team players, get the job done.

Every Monday morning at Nest, that’s how my management meetings started: Who are the great people we want to hire? Are we making our hiring goals or retention metrics? If not, what’s the problem? What are the roadblocks?

when most people are self-managing, the absolute maximum number of people one human being can effectively manage directly is 8–15 full-time employees. As the company grows, that number shrinks to around 7–8.

Make sure you prepare any potential managers to take the reins—don’t just throw them into the deep end. To keep the org flat, try to avoid situations where managers only have two to three direct reports long term.

Functional teams grow, and sub-teams within the larger teams form. Each team begins to develop its own work style around the types of work they do. Specialization is more and more necessary. Many team members begin to pick a lane and focus on a particular area, rather than have the (double-edged) luxury of being a jack-of-all-trades.

Hallway conversations won’t cut it anymore.

But you’ll also need to speak openly about how it’s scary for them and for you and for the company. Acknowledge that there are things that you’ll lose, and that those losses will not be easy.

The problem is usually the people at the top—the team leaders can keep only so many projects in their heads. They can focus on three, four, five projects but by the time they get to six or seven their brains are fried. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. So those projects get sidelined for later, and later never comes.

You’ll need to break your org into product specific groups so that each product gets the attention it deserves. This team works on the thermostat, this team works on the smoke alarm. And then you might have to subdivide again. At Nest we ended up creating a team for accessories;

Then go to the rest of the team in 1:1s and mention that you’re thinking of promoting this person, but you want to make sure everyone is comfortable first. Say, “Let’s give it a try. If you have any issues, come to me.” Start getting everyone used to the idea and give the candidate time to shine.

Some will just be mediocre. In those moments, it’s your responsibility to help them find other opportunities—within the company or outside it. They tried something and failed, and that means they learned. That’s okay. Life is the process of elimination and now they’re free to try something new.

You might turn some meetings into status update reports and reduce the number of people who attend. But then you have to be wary of too many reports—you don’t want the teams spending tons of time releasing information that nobody reads. It’s a constant battle.

And if you don’t recognize that, you get trapped. Like Google. Up until very recently, all 140,000 people at Google attended a 2–3 hour all-hands meeting every week—the famous (or infamous) TGIF meeting.

was buried years ago. Most Googlers spent the entire three hours making memes about the meeting in an internal app called Memegen.

Culture arises organically but then needs to be codified to be maintained.

So write down your company values and post them on your physical and virtual walls. Share them with new employees. Make them part of every interview with new candidates.

And make every team write down how they do things: What’s the marketing process? What’s the engineering process?

you’re growing geometrically—in all directions at once—then you need a strong, stable core at the center.

Then roles and responsibilities overlap, there’s a ton of redundancy in the upper levels, they have to invent weird new titles for people, and nobody knows what they should be working on.

What do they do when they sit down on the couch? What are they watching? When are they watching? Who’s watching with them? What do they use each remote for and how often? Where do they keep them? What happens when they grab the wrong one?

Literally the only way to make a really good product is to dig in, analyze your customer’s needs, and explore all the possible options (including the unexpected ones: maybe I can work from home, maybe I can move closer to work). There are no perfect designs. There are always constraints. But you choose the best of all the options—aesthetically, functionally, and at the necessary price point.

Most people are so habituated to the problems in their home lives or work that they no longer realize they’re problems. They simply go about their day, get into bed, close their eyes, realize they left the lights on in the kitchen, groan and grump down the stairs, without ever thinking: Why is there no light switch in my bedroom that turns off all the lights in the house?

But good marketing isn’t bullshitting. It’s not about making something up, crafting a fiction, exaggerating your product’s benefits, and burying its faults.

It took weeks to get this page written. And as the product evolved, the page evolved alongside

Finding the best, most honest expression of a product or feature is not easy.

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).

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

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

when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs—except one: battery life.

The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context.

“Why will customers care?” And that question has to be answered long before anyone gets to work.

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.

But they’re also not directing everything. Their job isn’t to be CEO of the product—or, God forbid, what some companies call the “product owner.”

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.

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.

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,

Even if on the surface everything seems to be working, there are a lot of downsides when the traditional commission model is fully played out. Most notably, it can breed hypercompetition and egoism and incentivize making a quick buck rather than ensuring that customers and the business are successful in the long term.

If the customer leaves, the salesperson loses the remainder of their commission.

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. The

Ross. They’re sensationalized, but not by much. The hypercompetition often breeds the kind of ego-driven, boozy, locker-room backslapping where everyone ends up at a strip joint,