Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

So do not lose your focus. Do not think you can serve two masters. No matter what you’re building, you can never forget who you’re building it for. You can only have one customer. Choose wisely.

There will be no break unless you force yourself to take one. So do all the stuff they tell you to do before bed: no caffeine, no sugar, keep it cold, keep it dark, and for the love of all that’s holy, keep your phone away from your bed. You’re an addict. We all are. So don’t make it too easy for yourself—charge your phone in another room. Don’t be the alcoholic with a whiskey bottle in their nightstand (I wish I could say I do this every day, but hey—I’m human, too). Then create time to breathe in your schedule. It’s all too easy to go from meeting to meeting to meeting, all day, with no chance to eat or go to the bathroom, never mind time to rest. But you have to. And I mean that literally. You have to do it. Otherwise you will fall apart. We’ve all seen (or been) parents with newborns on the brink of total collapse—that’s what it can feel like. Part of your job is not to go completely nuts at work and take it out on your team.

It’s your responsibility as a leader not to try to deal with a disaster on your own. Don’t lock yourself in a room, alone, frantically trying to fix it. Don’t hide. Don’t disappear. Don’t imagine that by working for a week straight and not sleeping you can solve the problem yourself and nobody ever has to know. Get advice. Take deep breaths. Make a plan.

Those people in that garage and that urgent need to prove our vision formed the core of the hard-driving, mission-driven culture that defined Nest. Growing that team the right way—breaking down who we needed, how to hire them, how to build team processes and ways of thinking—was just as important as building the right product.

In an interview I’m always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?” I also ask, “Why did you leave your last job?” Not the most original question, but the answer matters. I’m looking for a crisp, clear story. If they complain about a bad manager or being the victim of politics, I ask what they did about it. Why didn’t they fight harder? And did they leave a mess behind them? What did they do to make sure they left in the right way? [See also: Chapter 2.4: I Quit.] And why do they want to join this company? That reason had better be completely different from why they left their previous job. They should have a new story, a compelling story, about what they’re excited about, who they want to work with, and how they want to grow and develop. Another good interview technique is to simulate work—instead of asking them how they work, just work with them. Pick a problem and try to solve it together. Choose a subject that both of you are familiar with but neither is an expert in—if you pick a problem in their domain they’ll always sound smart; pick a problem in yours and you’ll always know better. But the subject doesn’t matter nearly as much as the process of watching them think. Get on the whiteboard, draw it out. What kinds of questions do they ask? What approaches do they suggest? Do they ask about the customer? Do they...

So when bringing in new employees—especially execs—you shouldn’t just throw them in the deep end, hand them a branded company notebook, and think you’re done. The first month or two are crucial and should be a period of positive micromanagement. Don’t worry about getting too in the weeds or not giving them enough freedom. Not at first. A brand-new person needs all the help they can get to become really well integrated. Explain how you do things in detail so they don’t make mistakes and alienate the rest of the team right off the bat. Talk to them about what’s working and what isn’t, what you would do in their position, what’s encouraged and what’s verboten, who to ask for help and who to treat with kid gloves. That’s the best way to immerse someone in the culture, style, and processes of a team. Give them the push they need to start running with the pack rather than leaving them standing on the starting line, reading some docs, hoping they’ll catch up.

Under normal circumstances nobody should ever be shocked that they’re getting fired or have to ask why it’s happening. They may not agree, of course. But anyone who’s struggling should be having weekly or twice-monthly 1:1 meetings about that struggle. That’s where issues are honestly discussed, solutions are attempted, and there’s a follow-up about what worked and what didn’t and what’s going to happen next. Just as people make a commitment to your company when they join it, you make a commitment to them. 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 or help them to find a spot at the company where they can be successful. But even with all the goodwill and good intentions in the world, sometimes it’ll become obvious to you and to the person on their way out that their issues are unsolvable, the team has lost confidence in them, and the world is full of other wonderful opportunities, with other, much less miserable jobs that you will happily help them find. And that’s when they’ll leave, usually of their own accord.

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; otherwise they’d have never gotten made. The mainline team would always say they’d get to it but the accessories projects were never their first priority, so they’d inevitably prioritize other things. Amazon, Square, Stripe, Twilio—pretty much every team with multiple product lines has had to re-org this way.

But you also need to occasionally stop and reevaluate your meetings and communications processes and change things up when they’re no longer an effective or efficient use of time. 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. Managers should always be paying attention to how many hours teams are sitting in meetings—both intra-team and inter-team—and working to keep those numbers under control.

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. TGIF is short for “Thank God it’s Friday” but it actually happened on Thursdays since Asia needed to attend (another example of something that doesn’t scale). Aside from a bit of banter from the execs, most of TGIF was dedicated to teams from across the company presenting their work. Sometimes the content was really interesting. Many times it wasn’t. But the purpose of the meeting—transmitting relevant information in an effective manner—was buried years ago. Most Googlers spent the entire three hours making memes about the meeting in an internal app called Memegen. And while that’s great for culture and a nice way of uniting the team, there’s no human on Earth who can claim it’s efficient or will help anyone do their job better. And it’s expensive. Even if you don’t factor in the cost of a large chunk of your company spending several hours a week making memes, there’s so much prep work involved. Google had a dedicated team for TGIF—dozens of people spent hundreds of hours on these weekly productions. So save the all-hands for when you really need them—make them special. Keep them regular but rare. And encourage smaller, inter-team groups to get together to share relevant information. They can even sit on the floor eating lemon bars. But the goals of the meetings should be ...

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. That’s a design process. That’s how I designed the iPod. That’s how I design everything.

You may not even need anyone to draw or make aesthetic choices. For example, 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? You may not come up with a name you love, but trying it yourself will allow you to, at the very least, appreciate and understand the naming process. It will give you the tools you need to work with an agency and learn from the tricks they use to reach a final suggestion.

Not everyone can be a great designer, but everyone can think like one. Designing isn’t something in your DNA that you’re simply born with—it’s something you learn. You can bring in coaches and teachers, classes and books to help get everyone into the right mindset. You can do it together. Even the greatest designers in the world can’t do it alone. Most people look at Apple design and say: this is the work of Steve Jobs. This is the work of Jony Ive. But that’s not remotely true. It’s never just one or two people pouring out their genius into a sketchbook, then handing it to some lowly employees to execute. Thousands upon thousands of people design for Apple—and it’s those teams that come together and create something truly unique and wonderful.

Pretty much everyone in the nineties dragged their CDs with them. Pretty much everyone had a beat-up leather case that lived in their car because it was too bulky for their bag. But pretty much nobody thought about it as a problem with a solution. Everyone just assumed it was part of life—if you wanted to listen to your music, you’d need to bring your CDs. The people who notice the problems around them—and then dream up solutions—are mostly inventors, startup founders, and kids. Young people look at the world and question it. They’re not worn down by doing the same stupid thing a thousand times—they don’t assume everything has to be the way it is. They ask “why?” Keeping your brain young is key. Seeing problems that are glossed over by others is useful. Coming up with solutions to those problems, using the vocabulary and thought process of a designer, is invaluable.

It seems like a small thing, but it was meaningful. It mattered. You opened up the box and your iPod was there to meet you, ready to change your life. Magic. The kind of magic anyone can do. You just have to notice the problem. And not wait around for someone to solve it for you.

Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.” If the messaging rings true, then the marketing is better. You don’t have to rely on bells and whistles, stunts, and dancing polar bears—you simply explain in the best way possible what you’re making and why you’re making it. And you tell a story: you connect with people’s emotions so they’re drawn to your narrative, but you also appeal to their rational side so they can convince themselves it’s the smart move to buy what you’re selling. You balance what they want to hear with what they need to know.

The whole product narrative should be in there—every pain, every painkiller, every rational and emotional impulse, every insight about your customer. It needs to encompass everything because: It’s essential for product development: Product management and marketing work on the messaging architecture from day one. In order to build a great product, each pain has to be extremely well understood and answered with a painkiller in the form of a product feature. The messaging architecture is a sister text to the plain list of features and their functionality that makes up your basic product messaging. Both need to exist side by side: the what and the why. It’s a living document: As the product and your team’s understanding of the customer evolve, so does the messaging architecture. It’s a shared resource: Everyone who is responsible for any customer touchpoints should be looking at this document, not just marketing. It should steer engineering, sales, and support as well. Every single team should be thinking about the what, the why, and the story you’re telling.

So when we were thinking about how the thermostat would reach customers, we laid out all the different ways people could discover our brand: advertising, word of mouth, social media, reviews, interviews, in-store displays, launch events. Then we laid out the next step in the process—how they’d learn about our product. Brochures, our website, packaging, etc. And then we created a messaging activation matrix. When we were deciding what went where, it was crucial to know which parts of the story customers would be exposed to at various points of the journey.

When the creative team wrote “The Nest Learning Thermostat saves energy,” the legal team made it “can save.” When they wrote “Customers saved 20–50% on their energy bills,” legal brought out the red pen and changed it to “Typical users experienced up to 20% in energy savings.” And then creative rolled their eyes and came back with another option. They pushed and pulled and negotiated until together everyone found the words we needed.

The reason is that marketing was part of the process from day one. Nobody was ignoring it, nobody was forgetting about it. We knew it was useful, so we used it. This perspective and focus allowed us to do something somewhat unique to Nest: marketing prototyped the product narrative in parallel with product development.

As we write this in 2021, Google has moved to give product managers more power for the first time. Google has always been technology and engineering-led, but now Search is being rearranged to favor product managers over engineers. It’s a huge move and a dramatic cultural shift. And the reason for it is simple: the customer needs a voice on the team. 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. That’s the job. 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. It lives between everything, a white space that morphs based on the customer, the needs of the business, and the abilities of the humans involved.

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing writes the messaging—the facts you want to communicate to customers—and gets the product sold. But from my experience that’s a grievous mistake. Those are, and should always be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained—the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you’re telling shapes the thing you’re making.

We created typical customer personas, then walked through the moments in their life when they used their iPods—while jogging, at parties, in the car. And we showed Steve that even if the number engineering gave us was twelve hours, those twelve hours actually lasted most people all week long. The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context.

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 can’t single-handedly dictate what will and will not make it in. Sometimes they’ll have the final opinion, sometimes they’ll have to say “no,” sometimes they’ll have to direct from the front. But that should be rare. Mostly they empower the team. 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. They have to escalate if someone needs to play bad cop, but know they can’t play that card too often. They have to know what to fight for and which battles should be saved for another day. They have to pop up in meetings all over the company where teams are representing their own interests—their schedules, their needs, their issues—and stand alone, advocating for the customer. They have to tell the story of the customer, make sure everyone feels it. And that’s how they move the needle.

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. 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.

If your sales culture is driven by transactions, then any relationship the salesperson cultivates will evaporate immediately after the customer signs on the dotted line. You don’t have a relationship with an ATM machine—you just walk up to it and take your money. And once a customer feels like an ATM, clawing them back is almost impossible. You have to bend over backward, twisting yourself into knots trying desperately to convince them to trust you again. Customer success or support will apologize and apologize and backpedal, cursing the sales team under their breath the whole time. You’ll probably still lose that customer. That’s why relationship sales cultures aren’t naive or simplistic. They’re necessary. And they’re proven. It’s the sales culture we set at Nest. It’s the culture I’ve pushed dozens of startups to adopt. It works better. Every single time. You get happier customers. You get a happier culture. You get teamwork and focus and progress toward your goal. Ideally you set up your business this way from the start. Everyone gets paid in salary, stock, and performance bonuses—sales, customer success, support, marketing, engineering, everyone. That’s not to say they get paid the same amount, but the compensation model is the same—everyone is aligned.

If you already have a transaction-oriented sales org and want to make the shift to a relationship-based one, it’ll be trickier. People will probably leave. A lot of them will tell you you’re crazy. But it can be done. First set up a mini–internal board populated by those other teams—customer support, customer success, operations—to approve each sales deal. That will start shifting the mindset from lone-wolf salesperson to being part of a team. Then start talking about the change to commissions. Don’t say you’re getting rid of them—that messes with people’s heads—just say that you’re doing them differently. Boost the size of the commission but start vesting it over time. And tell the sales team they’ll lose the remainder of the commission if the customer leaves. You can also offer an even larger commission if they’ll take stock over cash. 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.

At Nest, we knew from the start that everything would come down to IP. Nest’s special sauce was always going to be our technological innovations. And those innovations would have to be aggressively patented to keep them out of the hands of the competition. So our first lawyer was Chip Lutton, the same lawyer I’d worked with on the iPod lawsuit.

It’s not easy. But all that attention, that care, the quest for perfection—they’ll raise the team’s own standards. What they expect of themselves. After a while, they’ll work incredibly hard not just to make you happy, but because they know how much pride they feel when they do world-class work. The entire culture will evolve to expect excellence from each other. So your job is to care. Because you’re it. You’re the top of the pyramid. Your focus, your passion, trickles down. If you don’t give a shit about marketing, you’ll get shitty marketing. If you don’t care about design, you’ll get designers who don’t care, either.

You don’t have to be an expert in everything. You just have to care about it. No matter your leadership style, no matter what kind of person you are—if you want to be a great leader, you have to follow that one cardinal rule. 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 pa...

In this job, respect is always more important than being liked. You can’t please everyone. Trying can be ruinous. CEOs have to make incredibly unpopular decisions—lay people off, kill projects, rearrange teams. Often you’ll have to take decisive action, hurt people to save the company, to cut out a cancer. You can’t skip surgery because you don’t want to upset Team Tumor. 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. It turns you into a babysitter. And kids may like the babysitter at first—it’s nice to go to the local park, to watch movies and eat pizza. It’s fun for a while. But eventually kids want to go further, do more. They want to go skateboarding. They want to explore. So they might start testing their boundaries to see what they can get away with. They might roll their eyes when the babysitter tells them what to do. Because a babysitter is not a parent. All kids need someone they respect who truly knows them. Who gives them a push at the right time, who helps them grow.

Bill Campbell helped me understand how he did it. Bill would always say that if there was any potentially surprising or controversial topic, the CEO should go to every board member, one-on-one, to walk them through it before the meeting. That allowed them to ask questions, offer different perspectives, and then the CEO had time to take those thoughts back to the team and revise their thinking, presentation, and plan.

The best board members are mentors first. They’re able to offer sound, helpful advice at critical moments in your product’s life or in yours. And they give as well as take—they enjoy the process of being on your board because they’re learning something, too. You just have to make sure they don’t use those learnings against you.

So don’t make everyone wait and gossip and squirm. At Nest, most of the exec team knew exactly what was going on because they were in the boardroom with me, and we always showed a redacted version of the board presentation to the whole company as soon as possible after the meeting. Here’s what we talked about, here’s what I’m concerned about, this is what the board had questions about, here are actions we’ll take.

So most bankers don’t want two companies to slowly feel each other out, get to know each other, date before marriage. They want them to meet and get engaged on the same night. They want them in a drive-through Elvis-themed chapel where everyone’s a little liquored up so they don’t ask too many questions. They want the deal wrapped up in thirty-six hours, before anyone has second thoughts, so they can pat each other on the back for a job well done and leave you standing in a blue ruffled tuxedo trying to figure out what’s next. And if it doesn’t work out in the long run, well, they did their jobs.

You can’t assume acquisition will mean acculturation. That’s why Apple doesn’t really buy companies with large teams. They only acquire specific teams or technologies, usually very early in their life cycle when they’re pre-revenue. That way they can easily be absorbed and Apple never has to worry about culture. They can also skip the inevitable duplication of functions between existing teams like finance, legal, and sales, or the painful process of integrating one large team into another. With the notable exception of the Beats acquisition, Apple has been laser focused on filling small, specialized technology gaps in their evolving products rather than acquiring whole new lines of business.

When you’re selling, the same questions apply. What are you looking for? Some hope to use a larger company’s resources to accelerate their vision. Others are looking for financial gain. Then there are the companies who are having problems and are trying to sell off the business to someone who believes in it. Bill Campbell liked to say, “Great companies are bought, not sold.” If you’re being acquired, you want the buyer to be desperate to buy rather than you being a seller desperate to sell. If you’re considering an acquisition, you want to be wary of anyone throwing themselves at you, pitching you too hard. However, there’s no manual for a good acquisition. There are a million things to watch out for, but they change with every company, every deal. Just don’t ignore the hard stuff simply because it’s hard. Don’t forget to talk about culture just because nobody quite knows how to talk about culture. Unfortunately, you can’t truly know a culture until you’re in it. It’s like dating—when two people are interested in each other, they put their best foot forward, keep up appearances. Things get much more real when they move in together and get married. That’s when you learn your wife leaves dishes in the sink to “soak” for a few days. It’s when you realize your husband always forgets to clean up his toenail trimmings. So the dating phase of any potential acquisition is crucial. You have to check the sink for dirty dishes. You have to spot the toenail on the dining table. Look a...

Getting benefits right is crucially important for your team and their families. You want to support the people you work with and make their lives better. Benefits allow your team and their families to stay healthy and happy and achieve their financial goals. This is where you should be spending your money. Perks are a very different matter. In and of themselves, perks are not a bad thing. Surprising and delighting your team is wonderful and often necessary. But 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. And if the primary way you’re attracting talent is through perks, then times will absolutely get tough.

If you want to give employees a perk, keep in mind two things: When people pay for something, they value it. If something is free, it is literally worthless. So if employees get a perk all the time, then it should be subsidized, not free. If something happens only rarely, it’s special. If it happens all the time, the specialness evaporates. So if a perk is only received occasionally, it can be free. But you should make it very clear that this is not going to be a regular occurrence and change up the perk so it’s always a surprise.