Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

Just whatever you do, don’t become a “management consultant” at a behemoth like McKinsey or Bain or one of the other eight consultancies that dominate the industry.

To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.

We invested in TiVo—the first digital video recorder, a revolutionary technology at the time that let you pause and save live TV—and in Audible, the first online audiobook service.

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. They would have happily demonstrated it on someone else’s hardware—but there was nobody else making devices that could play audio. Not even for their tiny single-channel mono spoken-word files.

So Nino became one of the first devices in the world to adopt Audible. It too...

Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. You’ll no longer be doing the things you do really well—instead you’ll be digging into how others do them, helping them improve. Your job will now be communication, communication, communication, recruiting, hiring and firing, setting budgets, reviews, one-on-one meetings (1:1s), meetings with your team and other teams and leadership, representing your team in those meetings, setting goals and keeping people on track, conflict resolution, helping to find creative solutions to intractable problems, blocking and tackling political BS, mentoring your team, and asking “how can I help you?” all the time.

4. Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.

people: If you’re doing what you loved in your old job, then you’re probably doing the wrong thing. You now lead a team of people doing what you used to be good at. So at least 85 percent of your time should be spent managing. If it’s not, then you aren’t doing it right. Managing is the job. And managing is hard.

Our culture was clear: we didn’t need managers. Everyone was smart and could manage themselves. So anyone who tried to be a real manager was pretty much ignored. It was great. Until the team grew. Until we needed to launch something and turn all these brilliant minds in one direction. Until we all had to agree on what was necessary and what got cut.

Magic, I realized coding and designing hardware wasn’t as interesting to me as seeing how the whole product—the whole business—came together.

I'd highlight basically this entire chapter.

We had no idea what Joe Sixpack might want, so we built features that we liked and just assumed the rest of the world would fall in line.

customer panels can’t design for shit. People just can’t articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another, especially if they’re considering something completely new that they’ve never used before. Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it’s terrible.

everyone wanted data so they wouldn’t have to make decisions themselves. Instead of moving forward with a design, you’d hear, “Well, let’s just test it.” Nobody wanted to take responsibility for what they were making.

The data wasn’t a guide. At best, it was a crutch. At worst, cement shoes. It was analysis paralysis.

A/B and user testing is not product design.

It can tell you something’s not working, but it won’t tell you how to fix it. Or it can show you an option that solves one hyperlocal issue but breaks something else downstream.

you can A/B test where the “Buy” button should go on a Web page, whether it should be blue or orange, but you shouldn’t be testing whether or not a customer should buy online. If you’re testing the core of your product, if the basic functionality can flex and change depending on the whims of an A/B test, then there is no core. There’s a hole where your product vision should be and you’re just shoveling data into the void.

when you’re making something new, there’s no way to definitively prove that people will like it. You just have to ship it—put it out into the world (or at least in front of forgiving customers or internal users) and see what happens.

This is often a tactic of people who are trying to cover their asses. It’s not my fault! I just went where the data sent me! The data doesn’t lie! That’s why some managers and execs and shareholders demand data even when there is none and then chase that imaginary data directly into the abyss. These are the kinds of people who won’t question their directions and drive their car right off a cliff. If at all possible they want to erase the human element—human judgment—from the equation.

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

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

Turns out we weren’t missing anything—but our testers were. They spent the first thirty minutes looking for tools—the wire stripper, the flathead screwdriver; no, wait, we need a Phillips. Where did I put that little one again? Once they got everything they needed, the rest of the installation flew by. Twenty, thirty minutes tops.

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.”

He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. 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.

So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example.

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

“1,000 songs in your pocket”

Rush Hour Rewards.

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.

There is a different model that aligns short-term business goals without neglecting long-term customer relationships. It’s based on vested commissions. 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.

Sales and customer success should be under one leader, in the same silo, being compensated in the same way. In this setup, sales can’t just throw a customer over the fence and never think about them again.