Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

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.

Your customer doesn’t differentiate between your advertising and your app and your customer support agents—all of it is your company. Your brand. All of it is one thing.

Even starting something new in a big company won’t protect you. You’ll have to deal with politics, jealousy, and fear. You’re trying to change things, and change is scary, especially to people who think they’ve mastered their domain and who are completely unprepared for the ground to shift under their feet.

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.

Everyone thinks they can do your job better—until they actually have to do it and deliver. So even if you’re in a high-stress job, you need to take vacations. They’re important for your team.

In today’s all-remote world, all of this is still true. And it’s even more important. When the watercooler disappears and spontaneous, unstructured communication disappears along with it, you have to be even more thoughtful, disciplined, and intentional about your communication strategies. You have to give people a road map to connect with each other.

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.

The danger with traditional commission-based sales models is that they create two different cultures: a company culture and a sales culture. The employees in these two cultures are compensated differently, think differently, care about different things.