Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

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.

Everything that needs to be created needs to be designed—not just products and marketing, but processes, experiences, organizations, forms, materials.

At its core, designing simply means thinking through a problem and finding an elegant solution. Anyone can do that. Everyone should.

none of that could have happened if he hadn’t tried it himself first. He just needed a push. Usually that’s all anyone who’s smart and capable really needs to shine.

take naming. It’s an issue all businesses face. But rather than calling in a naming or branding agency to pick a name for you, sit down and approach the problem like a designer: Who is your customer and where will they encounter this name? What are you trying to get your customer to think or feel about your product? What brand attributes or product features are most important to highlight with this name? Is this product part of a family of products or is it stand-alone? What will the next version be called? Should the name be evocative of a feeling or idea or a straightforward description? Once you come up with a list, begin to use the names in context. How does it work in a sentence? How do you use it in print? How do you use it graphically?

Sometimes you really do need to hire an expert. Sometimes a brilliant designer can build you a ladder and help your team out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. But the whole time, your team should be watching and learning and asking questions so they can make their own ladders in the future.

Ask why at every step—why is it like this now? How can it be better? Think like a user who has never tried this product before; dig into their mindset, their pain and challenges, their hopes and desires.

Break it down into steps and set all the constraints up front. [See also: Chapter 3.5: Heartbeats and Handcuffs.] Understand and tell the story of the product. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] Create prototypes all along the way.

To be a great designer you can’t lock yourself in a room—you have to connect with your team, with your customer and their environment, and other teams who may have innovative ideas to bring to the table. You have to understand your customer’s needs and all the different ways you can address them. You have to look at a problem from all angles. You have to get a little creative. And you have to notice the problem in the first place.

Marketing cannot just be figured out at the very end. When building a product, product management and the marketing team should be working together from the very beginning. As you build, you should continue to use marketing to evolve the story and ensure they have a voice in what the product becomes.

Use marketing to prototype your product narrative. The creative team can help you make the product narrative tangible. This should happen in parallel with product development—one should feed the other.

The product is the brand. The actual experience a customer has with your product will do far more to cement your brand in their heads than any advertising you can show them. Marketing is part of every customer touchpoint whether you realize it or not.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. You can’t just make an ad and think you’re done. The ad leads to a website that sends you to a store where you purchase a box that contains a guide that helps you with installation, after which you’re greeted by a welcome email. The entire experience has to be designed together, with different touchpoints e...

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

As the product and your team’s understanding of the customer evolve, so does the messaging architecture.

Everything is connected to everything, so everything must be understood together. It wasn’t micromanagement—it was care. I was putting the same amount of energy and time into the beginning of the customer journey as I put into the end.

The question of why we made it connected explicitly to why anyone should buy it. We had to get it right—for our customers and for ourselves.

The majority of companies I work with misunderstand the role of the product manager—if they even know it exists. They think it’s marketing (nope), it’s project management (nope), it’s press relations/communications (nope), it’s design (nope), product finance (nope), it’s the founder or CEO’s job (not really).

If the product manager is the voice of the product, the project manager is the voice of the project—their job is to alert the team to potential problems that could stall or derail the project and to help find solutions.

Engineers like to build products using the coolest new technology. Sales wants to build products that will make them a lot of money. But the product manager’s sole focus and responsibility is to build the right products for their 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.

Sometimes product managers need to be extremely technical—usually in B2B settings where the user of the product is extremely technical, too. If you’re selling brake systems to a car company, you’d better really understand brakes. Having a deep well of knowledge about brakes is the only way you’ll connect with your customer and understand what they care about.

The thread that tied all these people and teams and pains and desires together was product management. For every successful product and company, all parts of your business end up leading back to them—it’s all hinged together in one central point. 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. Because they have to understand it all, make sense of it.

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.

Many salespeople won’t give two shits about your mission. They’ll be focused on how much they’re making month to month. They’ll want to close deals and get paid. It won’t matter what they’re selling as long as it sells.

But if sales is off to the side, doing their own thing, barely part of the company but steadily meeting their monthly goals, that can breed an insulated, transactional culture. And the way customers are treated in that kind of culture can be brutal—even in places where you’d assume customers must be treated well in order for salespeople to make any money.

one day something will go wrong. Maybe it’ll be with the product—you’ll have an issue and business will slow down. In that moment, the time when you need them most, your sales team will abandon you. They’ll go wherever the sales are hot. Why should they stick with you if they can’t make money right now?

Once commissions are vested on a schedule that prioritizes customer relationships, a lot of the ugliness that usually defines sales cultures disappears. Salespeople do a better job qualifying customers, the hypercompetition eases up, the backslapping fades, the teams align their expectations and their goals.

if you’re running a business, every decision involving legal matters is a business-driven decision. Purely legal-driven decisions only happen in court. Your legal team is there to inform your choices, not make them for you. So a “no” from legal isn’t the end of the conversation—it’s the beginning. A great lawyer will help you identify roadblocks, then move around them and find solutions.

If a leader gets distracted from the customer—if business goals and spreadsheets full of numbers for shareholders become a higher priority than customer goals—the whole organization can easily forget what’s most important.

The other commonalities of successful leaders are just as straightforward: They hold people (and themselves) accountable and drive for results. They’re hands-on, but to a point. They know when to back off and delegate. They can keep an eye on the long-term vision while still being eyeball-deep in details. They’re constantly learning, always interested in new opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new people. And they do it because they’re engaged and curious, not because those things may end up making them money. If they screw up, they admit to it and own their mistakes. They’re not afraid to make hard decisions, even when they know people will be upset and angry. They (mostly) know themselves. They have a clear view of both their strengths and challenges. They can tell the difference between an opinion- and data-driven decision and act accordingly. [See also: Chapter 2.2: Data Versus Opinion.] They realize that nothing should be theirs, even if the genesis was with them. It all has to be the team’s. The company’s. They know their job is to jubilantly celebrate everyone else’s successes, to make sure they get credit for them, and hold little for themselves. They listen. To their team, to their customers, to their board, to their mentors. They pay attention to the opinions and thoughts of the people around them and adjust their views when they get new information from sources they trust.

Great leaders can recognize good ideas even if those ideas didn’t come out of their own mouths. They know that good ideas are everywhere. They’re in everyone.

Delaying hard decisions, hoping problems will resolve themselves, or keeping pleasant but incompetent people on the team might make you feel better. It may give you the illusion of niceness. But it chips away at the company, bit by bit, and erodes the team’s respect for you.

just because you’re in charge does not mean you’re in control. You plan out your day, think you’re finally going to have some time to talk to people, look at the product, meet with engineering. Then your day disappears. There’s always some new crisis, some new people problem, someone quitting, someone complaining, someone falling apart.

Good CEOs walk in with a presentation of where the company was, where it is now, and where it’s headed this quarter and in the years to come. They tell the board what’s working but they’re also transparent about what isn’t and how they’re addressing it. They present a fully formed plan that the board can question, object to, or try to modify. Things might get a little heated, a little bumpy, but in the end everyone walks out of the meeting understanding and accepting the CEO’s vision and the company’s path forward.

If you’re struggling to explain what you’re building and why, if you’re presenting a report without really understanding it, if the board is asking you questions that you can’t answer—then you have not internalized what’s actually going on at your company.

When two fully formed companies merge, their cultures need to be compatible. Just like any relationship, everything ultimately comes down to how well people get along, what their goals are, what their priorities are, and what drives them crazy.

Fifty to 85 percent of all mergers fail due to cultural mismatches.

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.” It’s turned Google into a place of wild abundance where anyone can more or less do anything—or sometimes nothing at all. They’ve been so profitable for so long and have had so few existential business threats that they’ve never had to cut back or slim down, never had to be scrappy. They haven’t had to really fight for anything in decades.

when perks are always free, appear constantly, and are treated like benefits, your business will suffer. An oversupply of perks hurts a company’s bottom line and, contrary to popular belief, employee morale. Some people can become obsessed with what they can get rather than what they can do—believing perks to be a right, not a privilege. Then when times get tough or when the perks don’t scale, they become outraged that their “rights” are being taken away.

Free will screw you every time. Getting a really great deal on something creates a completely different mindset than expecting to get it for nothing.

Subsidizing perks rather than giving them away is obviously much better financially for your business, too. Companies that bubble-wrap their employees with tons of free perks are usually shortsighted and have no long-term strategy to sustain those perks, or they have an innately problematic core business and the perks are the cover.