Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

By the end of the first iPhone project we had about eight hundred people working on it. But can you imagine what would have happened if all eight hundred had been with us from the beginning, watching us abandon the vision and restart the project? And then do it again a few months later? It would have been mayhem. Eight hundred people panicking and us endlessly reassuring everyone, focusing on the positive, trying to keep all those people in sync with a truly crazy number of iterations. So keep your project small as long as you can. And don’t allocate too much money at the start. People do stupid things when they have a giant budget—they overdesign, they overthink. That inevitably leads to longer runways, longer schedules, and slower heartbeats. Much, much slower. Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship—24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months. That applies to hardware and software, atoms and bits. Of course, there are things that take longer—research can take decades, for example. But even if it takes ten years to research a question, regular check-ins along the way ensure you’re still chasing the right answer. Or still asking the right question.