Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine. But you can’t overdo it—you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel.

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.

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.

sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)

“I’m doing this for the first time. I’m still learning. Please tell me what I can do to make things better.” That’s it. But that’s a huge mindset shift.

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.

I didn’t try to change who I was. You are who you are. If you have to completely rearrange your personality to become a manager, then it will always be an act and you won’t get comfortable in the role.

So my leadership style is loud and passionate, mission-focused above all else. I pick a goal then run full speed ahead, refusing to let anything stop me, and expect everyone to run with me.

But I also realize that what motivates me may not be what motivates my team.

as a manager, you have to find what connects with your team. How can you share your passion with them, motivate them? The answer, as usual, comes down to communication. 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.

Even if your team is all fired up about the mission, don’t forget about extrinsic motivation. These are human beings. They may need a raise, a promotion, or even a party. A kind word. Figure out what makes them feel valued. Understand what makes them happy at work.

Data-driven: You can acquire, study, and debate facts and numbers that will allow you to be fairly confident in your choice. These decisions are relatively easy to make and defend and most people on the team can agree on the answer.

Opinion-driven: You have to follow your gut and your vision for what you want to do, without the benefit of sufficient data to guide you or back you up. These decisions are always hard and always questioned—after all, everyone has an opinion.

We were right to define our target customer clearly, to talk to them and find out what problems they had. But then it was our job to figure out the best way to fix those problems. We were right to ask their opinions and get feedback about our designs. But then it was our job to use those insights to move forward in a direction we believed in.

Nothing in the world is ever 100 percent sure. Even scientific research with entirely data-based outcomes is actually filled with caveats—we

you can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist. You just have to take that first step into the unknown. Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next.

Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

“It’s not data or intuition; it’s data and intuition.”

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude higher than to produce it.”

Jobs are not interchangeable. Work is not just a sweater you can take off when things get hot. Too many people jump ship the second they need to dig in and really push through the hard, grinding work of making something real. And when you look at their résumés you can instantly see the pattern.

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.

sometimes you do need hardware—it can’t be avoided. But when that happens, I still tell people to put it away. I say, “Don’t tell me what’s so special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.”

Your product isn’t only your product. It’s the whole user experience—a chain that begins when someone learns about your brand for the first time and ends when your product disappears from their life, returned or thrown away, sold to a friend or deleted in a burst of electrons. Fig.

That’s how you hack your brain. How you hack the brains of everyone on your team. Start from that very first moment of the customer journey. You should be prototyping your marketing long before you have anything to market.

Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems.

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.”

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. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.

If part of the story didn’t work, then part of the product wasn’t going to work, either, and would need to be changed. That’s ultimately why the iPhone had a glass front face instead of plastic and why it didn’t have a hardware keyboard.

Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it? To find that “why,” you need to understand the core of the problem you’re trying to solve, the real issue your customers face on a regular basis.

When you get wrapped up in the “what,” you get ahead of people. You think everyone can see what you see. But they don’t. They haven’t been working on it for weeks, months, years. So you need to pause and clearly articulate the “why” before you can convince anyone to care about the “what.”

you have to find an opportunity to craft stories that stick with customers and keep them talking about you. Even if your customer knows you and your product, or they’re highly technical, there are frictions that you can eliminate for them. You can explain why they need one version of lubricant over the other or give them information they never had before. Or you explain why buying the same product from your company is better than buying that product from a competitor.

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.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so t...

That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience.

Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people and do more to convince them to buy your product than any amount of talking you do about yourself on your own platforms. You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.

Your version one (V1) product should be disruptive, not evolutionary. But disruption alone will not guarantee success—you can’t ignore the fundamentals of execution because you think all you need is a brilliant disruption. And even if you do execute your idea well, it may not be enough.

Assuming V1 was at least a critical success, the second version of your product is typically an evolution of your first. Refine what you made in V1 using data and insights from actual customers and double down on your original disruption.

You can continue evolving that product for a while, but always seek out new ways to disrupt yourself. You can’t only start thinking about it when the competition threatens to catch up or your business begins to stagnate.

The key is to find the right balance—not so disruptive that you won’t be able to execute, not so easy to execute that nobody will care. You have to choose your battles. Just make sure you have battles.

If you’re disrupting big, entrenched industries, your competition will almost certainly dismiss you in the beginning. They’ll say that what you’re making is a plaything, not a threat. They’ll flat out laugh in your face.

If they can’t innovate, they litigate.

that’s the tricky thing with disruptions—they’re an extremely delicate balancing act. When they fall apart it’s usually for one of three reasons:

You focus on making one amazing thing but forget that it has to be part of a single, fluid experience. [See also: Figure 3.1.1, in Chapter 3.1.] So you ignore the million little details that aren’t as exciting to build—especially for V1—and end up with a neat little demo that doesn’t actually fit into anyone’s life.

Conversely, you start with a disruptive vision but set it aside because the technology is too difficult or too costly or doesn’t work well enough. So you execute beautifully on everything else but the one thing ...

Or you change too many things too fast and regular people can’t recognize or understand what you’ve made. That’s one of the (many) issues that befell Google Glass. The look, the technology—it was all so new that people had no idea what to do with it. There was no intuitive understanding of what the thing was for. It’s as if Tesla decided out the gate to build electric cars with five wheels and two steering wheels. You can change the motor, change ...

We dreamed about various iTunes features while we were building the iPod. But we didn’t have time to execute it and we’d already disrupted enough. We needed to get people from CDs to MP3s—that was a big leap already. We’d only be successful if they had time to catch their balance before we asked them to jump again.

Most people stall out at the first step—the first disruption. It’s easy to say “change something meaningful,” and infinitely harder to come up with a great idea and execute it in a way that connects with customers.

The next year, you decide to do it again. This time it’s V2. And it’s completely different—you know where you’re going, you know what it takes to get there, and you know your team. You now have the confidence to be bolder, take bigger risks, to go further than you ever thought before.

But on that very first journey, you won’t have those advantages. You’ll need to make many opinion-driven decisions without the benefit of data or experience to guide you.

The tools you need to make those decisions are below, organized by order of importance: