Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

And you can’t skip a step—you can’t just have the answers handed to you and detour around the hard stuff. Humans learn through productive struggle, by trying it themselves and screwing up and doing it differently next time.

And even if there’s a brilliant vision for the future of AR glasses, the technology can’t deliver it yet and the social stigma will take a long time to dissolve. I’m convinced it’ll happen, but they’re still years away.

Bill Gurley, the incredibly smart, wry, contrarian Silicon Valley VC and Texan deal maker, puts it this way: “I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”

knew Philips would be different, but it was shocking. Dark wood paneling with smoke stains from the 1970s, no cubicles, constant meetings, managers who just said no to everything. An old guard of old Dutch guys complaining about the lack of Douwe Egberts coffee and frikandel (if you don’t know, don’t ask). Everywhere I looked I saw the same bad suit I’d ditched after my first General Magic interview. I was twenty-five years old and had never really managed anyone, never built a team.

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. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement.

So 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.

“Don’t tell me what’s so special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.”

There are bumps between Awareness and Acquisition, between Onboarding and Usage, between every phase of the journey, that you have to help customers over. In each of these moments, the customer asks “why?” Why should I care? Why should I buy it? Why should I use it? Why should I stick with it? Why should I buy the next version?

The packaging led everything. The product name, the tagline, the top features, their priority order, the main value props—they were literally printed on a cardboard box that we constantly held, looked at, tweaked, revised. The physical limitations of the box forced us to zero in on exactly what we wanted people to understand first, second, third. To fit the tiny space, the creative team crafted crisp descriptions that we could later use in our videos, our advertising, on our website, and in interviews with press.

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.” That “why” is the most critical part of product development—it has to come first.

After the setup, he reminded the audience of the problem Apple was solving for them. “The most advanced phones are called smartphones, so they say. And the problem is that they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy to use.”

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.

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.”

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.

To maintain the core of your product there are usually one or two things that have to stay still while everything else spins and changes around them. And that’s a useful constraint.

Here’s the trick: write a press release. But don’t write it when you’re done. Write it when you start. I began doing this at Apple and eventually realized other leaders had figured it out, too (looking at you, Bezos). It’s an incredibly useful tool to narrow down what really matters.

You need natural pauses so people can catch up to you—so customers and reviewers can give you feedback that you can then integrate into the next version. And so your team can understand what the customer doesn’t.

After you’ve launched your V1, then two to four times in that year, you should be announcing something to the world. New products, new features, new redesigns or updates. Something meaty that’s worth people’s attention.

And customers need time to feel you out. The vast majority of people aren’t early adopters—they won’t try new things right away. They need time to get used to the idea, time to read some reviews, time to ask their friends, and then time to wait until the next version comes out because that’ll probably be even cooler.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

So you’ll still need to go through at least three generations before you get it right. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. Every product. Every company. Every time.

It was fatter than we wanted. The screen wasn’t quite what I imagined. Kind of like the first iPod, actually. But it worked. It connected to your phone. You could install it yourself. It learned what temperatures you liked. It turned itself down when nobody was home. It saved energy. And people loved it.

There are three elements to every great idea: 1. It solves for “why.” Long before you figure out what a product will do, you need to understand why people will want it. The “why” drives the “what.” [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] 2. It solves a problem that a lot of people have in their daily lives. 3. It follows you around. Even after you research and learn about it and try it out and realize how hard it’ll be to get it right, you can’t stop thinking about it.

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamin pills are good for you, but they’re not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference. But you’ll notice real quick if you forget a painkiller.

But you should commit a month—or two, or six—to researching and poking around and making some rough prototypes, articulating your story of “why.” If during that month—or two, or six—you only get more excited about the idea and can’t stop thinking about it, then you can get more serious. Take at least another few months—possibly up to a year—to look at it from every angle and consult with people you trust, create some business plans and presentations, and prepare as well as you possibly can.

Then as the weeks of research and strategy began to come together, I stopped saying it was an idea and started saying I was building a product. Even though it wasn’t quite true yet. But I wanted it to feel real—to get them, and especially me, to really dive to the details. I wanted to convince them and I wanted them to challenge it and I wanted to tell the story. To figure out if it held together.

The interesting thing is that delayed intuition generally doesn’t make it less scary. If anything, the more you understand it, the more butterflies in your stomach it’ll give you. Because you’ll uncover all the ways it can go wrong; you’ll know the million things that might kill this idea and your business and your time. But knowing what can kill you makes you stronger.

The potential company-destroying problems—and the steps to mitigate them—went on and on. But listing them out, breaking them down, talking honestly about them, that’s what ultimately convinced investors that we really knew what we were getting into. And that we could make it work.

Eventually, each of those risks became a rallying cry for the team—instead of avoiding them, we embraced them. We continually said to ourselves, “If it were easy, everyone else would be doing it!” We were innovating.

That’s the thing to remember about B2B2C—it doesn’t matter how many businesses are involved: ultimately it’s the end consumer who carries the business model on their back.