Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

There’s often an assumption that if you find the right job when you’re young, you can guarantee some level of success. That your first job out of college connects in a straight line to your second and your third, that at each stage of your career you’ll use your inevitable wins to propel yourself upward.

The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail. Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.

The critical thing is to have a goal. To strive for something big and hard and important to you. Then every step you take toward that goal, even if it’s a stumble, moves you forward.

The key is persistence and being helpful. Not just asking for something, but offering something. You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged. You can always trade and barter good ideas; you can always be kind and find a way to help.

enjoy the paycheck while working on your tiny piece of some vast and endless project. Then spend your ample free time getting a feel for the structures and divisions, the micro-disciplines, the processes, the research, the long-term projects and long-term thinking a company can do when shipping tomorrow isn’t critical to its survival.

But don’t get stuck between the elephant’s toes so you can never see the whole beast. It’s easy to mistake navigating processes, red tape, job leveling, and politics for real personal growth.

When you get a chance to work with legends and heroes and gods, you realize they’re none of the things that you’ve fabricated in your brain. They can be geniuses in one area and clueless in another. They can raise you up by praising your work, but you can also help them, catch things they miss, and build a relationship based not on starry-eyed hero worship but mutual respect.

You should have a weekly crib sheet that helps you keep your priorities and the questions you need to ask top of mind.

It’s important to remember that even if you have to criticize someone’s work or their behavior, you’re not doing it to hurt them. You’re there to help. Every word should come from a place of caring.

Before I learned to create a little distance between what I felt and what I needed to express at work, I let too many of my worries and fears leak into my voice and into my daily interactions. Your team amplifies your mood,

if someone under you does something spectacular, that just shows the company that you’ve built a great team. And that you should be rewarded for it. There should always be at least one or two people on your team who are natural successors to you. Those are the people you have more 1:1s with, who you pull into leadership meetings, who everyone will begin to notice. The more they notice them, the better. That will make it much easier for you to get promoted, because there will be no question about who can run your team when you move into another role.

Not everyone on the team agreed with me. That’ll happen sometimes when one person has to make the final call. In those moments it’s your responsibility as a manager or a leader to explain that this isn’t a democracy, that this is an opinion-driven decision and you’re not going to reach the right choice by consensus. But this also isn’t a dictatorship. You can’t give orders without explaining yourself. So tell the team your thought process. Walk through all the data you looked at, all the insights you gathered, and why you ultimately made this choice. Take people’s input. Listen, don’t react.

Storytelling is how you get people to take a leap of faith to do something new. It’s what all our big choices ultimately come down to—believing a story we tell ourselves or that someone else tells us. Creating a believable narrative that everyone can latch on to is critical to moving forward and making hard choices. It’s all that marketing comes down to. It’s the heart of sales.

“It’s not data or intuition; it’s data and intuition.” You need both. You use both. And sometimes the data can only take you so far. In those moments, all you can do is take a leap.

she did the only thing you can do when faced with a controlling asshole: Kill ’em with kindness. Ignore them. Try to get around them. Quit.

After we stopped the assholes from ruining the product and screwing over customers, we could stop crafting narratives. Stop playing the stupid games we never wanted to play in the first place. We could get back to the work we loved. That’s the thing about assholes—they’re so incredibly unpleasant that they stand out in your memory. They get a whole chapter in your book. But most people just want to go to the office and make something cool.

hating your job is never worth whatever raise, title, or perks they throw at you to stay. I know that may ring hollow coming from me, a lucky, wealthy person. But the way I’ve gotten wealthy is not by accepting giant paychecks or titles to do jobs I know I’ll hate. I follow my curiosity and my passion. Always. And that’s meant leaving money on the table—so much money that people thought I might actually be crazy.

Most people at the top are interested to hear what’s happening down below. They may reward you for bringing it to their attention. They may even share your frustrations (although they might not tell you that). And yes, you’ll probably drive your boss nuts. Going around your manager is always touchy. I drove my managers completely insane every time I sidestepped them to reach out to some other executive. So if they ask, tell your boss what you’re doing—and tell them why. This is a time to ask for forgiveness, not permission. Explain that you’ve talked to them (and you should have first) but nothing is getting fixed.

I’d tried everything—engaging him, ignoring him, fighting him, soothing his ego—but now the project was done. My team had worked nonstop for ten months. So I asked for what was promised—the title I should have already had. “When do I get VP?” And he said, “Let’s wait a year. These things take time. No one gets promoted that fast.” He knew damn well that I deserved a higher title from the start, that he’d stiffed me on the way in

After a decade of failure, I finally made something—actually two things—that people actually wanted. I finally got it right. But it didn’t feel like success at first. Or even in the end. It was still work, every step of the way. Apple is where I learned where to draw the line—is it done enough? Is it good enough? It’s where I learned the real meaning of design. And it’s where I learned to organize my brain and my team in the face of intense, grinding, never-ending pressure.

It was a constant battle with every new generation of thermostat. The screwdriver was expensive. Each one ate into our margins. So there was always a brigade of employees petitioning to remove it—they couldn’t understand why we’d add to our COGS (cost of goods sold) that way. But they didn’t understand that it wasn’t a straight COGS line item. It was a marketing expense. And a support expense. That screwdriver saved us so much money on phone support. Instead of angry calls, we had happy customers raving online about their great experience.

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. Steve was a master of this. Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it.

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.”

Every person is different. And everyone will read your story differently. 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.

If you’re going to pour your heart into creating something new, then that thing should be disruptive. It should be bold. It should change something.

If you do it right, one disruption will fuel the next. One revolution will domino into another. People will laugh at you and tell you it’s ludicrous, but that just means they’re starting to pay attention. You’ve found something worth doing. Keep doing it.

For any really new product, reliable data will be limited or nonexistent. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a reasonable attempt to gather objective information—the scope of the opportunity, the way people use current solutions, etc. But this information will never be definitive. It won’t make your decisions for you.

General Magic was flailing and needed a pair of handcuffs. It needed to set a date for launch and hold to it. But that’s always the crisis of V1: when do you launch? You don’t have any customers, you haven’t really told the world what you’re working on. It’s all too easy to just keep working. So you have to force yourself to stop. Construct a deadline and handcuff yourself to it.

We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team. That last point is important.

Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions.] They demanded to be shown ahead of time that the unit and business economics of the product were sound. But that was impossible. They were asking us to predict the future with near 100 percent confidence. They were asking for proof that a baby could run a marathon before it had even learned to walk. These guys didn’t know much about babies. They knew even less about how to create a new business.

Before you commit to executing on an idea—to starting a company or launching a new product—you should commit to researching it and trying it out first. Practice delayed intuition.

Once you have a really strong “why,” you have the germ of a great idea. But you can’t build a business on a germ. First you have to figure out if this idea is actually strong enough to carry a company. You need to build a business and implementation plan. And you have to understand if it’s something you want to work on for the next five to ten years of your life.

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. The risks and our ability to solve for them was what set us apart. We would do something nobody else thought possible.

V1 is always completely, utterly terrifying. Always. Big, great, new ideas scare the living crap out of everyone who has them. That’s one of the signs that they’re great.

That’s what you need when you’re going to start a company or start a huge new project—a coach. A mentor. A source of wisdom and aid. Someone who can recognize a brewing problem and warn you about it before it happens.

If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.”

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.

Even just taking notes on a computer was a nonstarter. Sometimes when I’m typing, I just . . . type. Whatever I’m writing down doesn’t make it all the way into my brain. But there was too much on the line for me to zone out, to not hear every word my team was saying. The act of using a pen, then retyping and editing later, forced me to process information differently.

You can’t solve interesting problems if you don’t notice they’re there.

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.

But good marketing isn’t bullshitting. It’s not about making something up, crafting a fiction, exaggerating your product’s benefits, and burying its faults. Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.”

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.

Product managers look for places where the customer is unhappy. They unravel issues as they go, discovering the root of the problem and working with the team to solve it. They do whatever is necessary to move projects forward—that could be taking notes in meetings or triaging bugs or summarizing customer feedback or organizing team docs or sitting down with designers and sketching something out or meeting with engineering and digging into the code. It’s different for every product.

He doesn’t just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. He can shake off his deep, geeky knowledge of the product and use it like a beginner, like a regular person. You’d be surprised how many product managers skip that hugely necessary step—listening to their customers, gaining insights, empathizing with their needs, then actually using the product in the real world. But for Joz, it’s the only way.

Building a product is like making a song. The band is composed of marketing, sales, engineering, support, manufacturing, PR, legal. And the product manager is the producer—making sure everyone knows the melody, that nobody is out of tune and everyone is doing their part. They’re the only person who can see and hear how all the pieces are coming together, so they can tell when there’s too much bassoon or when a drum solo’s going on too long, when features get out of whack or people get so caught up in their own project that they forget the big picture.

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.

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. And they do it alone. They’re one of the most important teams at a company and one of the smallest.

There’s no four-year college degree for product management, no obvious source you can hire from. Amazing product managers usually emerge from other roles. They start in marketing or engineering or support, but because they care so deeply about the customer, they start fixing the product and working to redefine it, rather than just executing someone else’s spec or messaging.

They create the experience they need to become great product managers. This person is a needle in a haystack. An almost impossible combination of structured thinker and visionary leader, with incredible passion but also firm follow-through, who’s a vibrant people person but fascinated by technology, an incredible communicator who can work with engineering and think through marketing and not forget the business model, the economics, profitability, PR. They have to be pushy but with a smile, to know when to hold fast and when to let one slide. They’re incredibly rare. Incredibly precious. And they can and will help your business go exactly where it needs to go.

In 2014, just before the Google acquisition, Nest spent around $250,000 per employee per year. That included decent office space, good health insurance, the occasional free lunch, and fun perks from time to time. After we were acquired, that number shot up to $475,000 per person.