Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

There were all these other squishy elements that needed to align to give any project any chance. Sales, marketing, product management, PR, partnerships, finance—they were all foreign and mysterious and hugely, sometimes desperately, necessary. While I was staring at my feet, workingworkingworking, making the most of a $5 million engineering budget, marketing was getting $10–15 million. I needed to understand why. So I asked.

And that’s what changed everything. As soon as I started talking to different teams, I realized my superpower. A lot of engineers only trust other engineers. Just like finance people only trust finance people. People like people who think like them. So engineers often keep their distance from sales, marketing, creative—all the functions that are soft, squishy. It’s just like how many marketing, sales, and creative teams often don’t talk to engineering. Too many numbers. Too black and white. Too many geeks in one room geeking out. But I wanted to understand the squishy stuff and the geeky stuff. And I liked all of it. I could also translate back and forth—explain the squish to engineers, translate the 1s and 0s to the creatives. I could synthesize all the pieces and keep the whole company in my head.

One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine.

But you can’t overdo it—you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel.

Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is prod...

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. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)

If either of you is nervous, you can start the conversation with something positive, ease into it, but don’t ignore the elephant in the room, don’t tiptoe around the reason you need to talk. 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. So tell them what’s holding them back. Then make a plan to work on it together. You’ll

started with some management classes. No class will give you all the answers, but any class is better than nothing. And then I went way beyond the basic classes you’ll take at a big company—I went down the rabbit hole. I started reading management books and realized that a great deal of management comes down to how you manage your own fears and anxieties. That led me to psychology books. And that led me to therapy. And yoga. I started both in 1995, long before either was widely accepted. It wasn’t because I was a crazy person or because becoming a manager was turning me into one. I did therapy and yoga for the same reasons: to find balance, to change the way I reacted to the world, to better understand myself and my emotions and how others perceived them.

So my leadership style is loud and passionate, mission-focused above all else. I pick a goal then run full speed ahead, refusing to let anything stop me, and expect everyone to run with me. But I also realize that what motivates me may not be what motivates my team. The world is not made up entirely of Tony Fadells (and let us all be grateful for that). There are also normal, sane people with lives and families and lots of things they can and need to do, all pulling at their time. So as a manager, you have to find what connects with your team. How can you share your passion with them, motivate them? The answer, as usual, comes down to communication. You have to tell the team why. Why am I this passionate? Why is this mission meaningful? Why is this small detail so important that I’m flipping out right now when nobody else seems to think it matters? Nobody wants to follow someone who throws themselves at windmills for no reason. To get people to join you, to truly become a team, to fill them with the same energy and drive that’s bubbling within you, you need to tell them the why.

Helping people succeed is your job as a manager. It’s your responsibility to make sure they can become the best versions of themselves. You need to create a setting where they can surprise you. And where they can surpass you. A lot of people resist that idea—they don’t want to hire people to do their jobs, and hiring someone who can do your job better than you is even more terrifying. It’s something I hear from new startup CEOs over and over: “Well, if I hire someone to do that … then what am I going to do?!”

If you’re a manager or leader or CEO, then your job is to be a manager or leader or CEO. You need to let go of taking pride in your individual daily accomplishments and start taking pride in the accrued wins of your team. Kwon Oh-hyun, the former CEO of Samsung Semiconductor and an incredible partner, big brother, and sometimes mentor to me as we worked together closely on the iPod, once put it this way: “Most managers are afraid that the people who work for them are going to be better than them. But you need to think of being a manager more like being a mentor or a parent. What loving parent wants their child NOT to succeed? You want your kids to be more successful than you, right?” Of course there’s a natural anxiety about getting shown up. The thought usually goes: “Wait, how can I manage Jane if Jane is better than me? If she excels at this and I don’t, then everyone will think she should be doing my job.” And I’m here to break it to you—that might be true. And that’s a good thing. Because 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.

If you’re a manager—congratulations, you’re now a parent. Not because you should treat your employees like children, but because it’s now your responsibility to help them work through failure and find success. And to be thrilled when they do.

If you’re a good manager and build a good team, that team will blast off. So lean into it. Cheer them on when they get promoted. Glow with pride when they kick ass at a board meeting or present their work to the entire company. That’s how you become a good manager. That’s how you start to love the

If you don’t have enough data to make a decision, you’ll need insights to inform your opinion. Insights can be key learnings about your customers or your market or your product space—something substantial that gives you an intuitive feeling for what you should do. You can also get outside input: talk to the experts and confer with your team. You won’t reach consensus, but hopefully you’ll be able to form a gut instinct. Listen to it and take responsibility for what comes next.

Except customer panels can’t design for shit. People just can’t articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another, especially if they’re considering something completely new that they’ve never used before. Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it’s terrible.

But we fell into the same trap as everyone else. We were wowed by the consultants, excited by the numbers. And we quickly became far too reliant on them: everyone wanted data so they wouldn’t have to make decisions themselves. Instead of moving forward with a design, you’d hear, “Well, let’s just test it.” Nobody wanted to take responsibility for what they were making.

There’s a hole where your product vision should be and you’re just shoveling data into the void. In our case—and in the case of every first-generation product—we could have been shoveling forever. There was never going to be enough data to make an assured choice.

We made decisions. I made decisions. This is in. This is out. This is how it’s going to work. 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. There may be a minority of team members who agree with the decision; there might be some good feedback that makes you modify your plan. If not, give the speech: I understand your position. Here are the points that make sense for our customers, here are the ones that don’t. We have to keep moving and, in this instance, I have to follow my gut. Let’s go. Even if some people on your team don’t love that answer, they’ll respect it. And they’ll trust you—they’ll know that they can speak up and criticize your choices and not get immediately shot down. And then they can sigh, and shrug, and go back to their team, communicate the “why” of the decision, and get on the train. That’s what’s always worked for me. It’s how my team at Philips came to accept my decisions.

But when you’re making something new, there’s no way to definitively prove that people will like it. You just have to ship it—put it out into the world (or at least in front of forgiving customers or internal users) and see what happens. It’s important at this stage to have a boss who understands the kinds of decisions you’re facing. You need a leader who trusts you, who’s ready to back you up. But those kinds of leaders—those kinds of human beings—are hard to find. Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them. Because if you follow your gut and your gut is wrong, then there’s nowhere else to cast blame. But if all you did was follow the data and you still failed, then clearly something else was wrong. Someone else screwed up.

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. And right now you’re selling—your vision, your gut, your opinion. So don’t just hit them with the classic “This is Jane, this is her life, and this is how her life changes when she uses our product” slide. Helping people see things from the customer’s perspective is a critical tool, but it’s just part of what you need to do. Your job in this moment is to craft a narrative that convinces leadership that your gut is trustworthy, that you’ve found all the data that could be gleaned, that you have a track record of good decisions, that you grasp the decision makers’ fears and are mitigating those risks, that you truly understand your customers and their needs and—most importantly—that what you’re proposing will have a positive impact on the business. If you tell that story well, if you bring people along with you on that journey, then they will follow your vision, even if there’s no hard data to back you up.

So you can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist. You just have to take that first step into the unknown. Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

However, you will also encounter people who can be very difficult to work with—who are gruff or loud or bossy or infuriating—and who may, at first, seem like assholes, but whose motivations and actions tell a very different story. It’s important to realize what kind of person you’re dealing with so you can understand how best to work with them—or, if necessary, how best to get around them.

A good way to know if you’re working with a mission-driven "asshole" is to listen to the mythos around them—there are always a few choice stories floating around about some crazy thing they’ve done, and the people who’ve worked with them closely are always telling everyone that they’re not that bad, really. Most tellingly, the team ultimately trusts them, respects what they do, and looks back at the experience of working with them fondly, because they pushed the team to do the best work of their lives.

It’s usually because I get loud. I ask nicely a few times and then—if we’re still not getting anywhere—I stop asking nicely. I put pressure on myself and the people around me. I don’t let up. I expect the best—from myself, from everyone else. I care deeply about our mission, our team, our customers. I can’t stop myself from caring.

So here’s how to deal with people like me, how to talk down a hurricane: ask why. It’s the responsibility of a passionate person—especially a leader—to describe their decision and make sure you can see it through their eyes. If they can tell you why they’re so passionate about something, then you can piece together their thought process and either jump on board or point out potential issues. So ask. Don’t be afraid to push. They’ll respect you more if you stand up for what you believe in. Mission-driven “assholes” want to be better at their jobs and fulfill that all-important mission—they want to make sure the company is heading in the right direction.

It’s something I was always telling my team at Apple whenever Steve Jobs went completely off the rails: “Yes, this idea is insane. But sanity will prevail! Even if Steve is wrong today, trust that he’ll get to the right answer sooner or later. We just need to find a better approach and make our case.” Prepare for some wind and some hail, but don’t worry about getting swept away: a mission-driven “asshole” might tear apart your work, but they won’t attack you personally. They won’t call you names or fire you for disagreeing with them. That’s the difference between a mission-driven “asshole” and a controlling one. Controlling assholes won’t listen. They’ll never admit they screwed up. Neither will political assholes. They’ll ignore obvious problems and deflect reasonable feedback, either because it’s not helpful politically or because their ego can’t take it. They don’t protect the product or the customer or the team. They protect themselves. And to be clear, Steve Jobs was not one of those assholes. Of course he crossed the line sometimes—he was human—but I didn’t condone it or excuse it and it wasn’t the norm. Steve was a mission-driven “asshole,” a passionate hurricane.

So 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. In that order. Start by giving them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’ve just had bad experiences before or they had a crappy relationship with whoever they used to work with on your team. Maybe they just don’t understand how to work with you. Maybe this is all just a giant misunderstanding—you’ll get over it and show them this can be a productive relationship.

If you have a good manager, ask them to protect you from the asshole. See if they can rearrange things so you don’t have to deal with this person and no longer have to hear their input.

If that doesn’t help, then just ignore them. Stop involving them in your decisions. Ask for forgiveness, not permission—and eventually don’t even bother asking for that. If you’re doing something valuable to the company and clearly worthwhile, then the asshole can yell or scheme all they want, but their hands will mostly be tied. Don’t be aggressive or unpleasant about it—just do your thing. Sometimes that can buy you enough time to complete your project in peace. Sometimes it can’t. After weeks of being ignored, after trying to cut me down in meeting after meeting, tiny slight after tiny slight, one asshole I worked with pulled me into his office—with HR present—looked me straight in the eye, and said, “There are two swinging dicks in this room. And mine is the biggest.” I’ll give him one thing: that was hard to ignore.

Political assholes thrive in large organizations where they can pull the kind of Machiavellian BS that makes you sound crazy and paranoid when you’re describing it. They find people who aren’t exceptional at their jobs and protect them in exchange for their allegiance. They get dirt on their peers—who’s having an affair with his admin? Can we get HR to cover it up?—then those people are indebted for

Political cliques are tit-for-tat, Survivor-esque pyramids, each asshole scrambling and fighting to be on top. Your group should be focused on raising each other up and protecting customers from the assholes’ terrible decisions. When an alliance of assholes starts spreading lies, or stealing ideas, or taking over projects they have no business touching, they will parrot each other’s words to leadership. They will make sure they all have the same narrative. They’ll back each other up until they’re impossible to ignore. That’s when your team needs to have a counternarrative. The bullshit-asymmetry theory, Brandolini’s law, will be at play here: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude higher than to produce it.” So you need to craft a great story and walk into meetings ready to support each other. Agree ahead of time—make sure everyone knows the script. Gather data to back you up so it’s not just your word against theirs. Then when the asshole pipes up, your crew will have the ammunition and manpower to call them out.

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. The vast majority of people who cause you trouble aren’t malicious or Machiavellian—they’re struggling, or first-time managers, or in the wrong job, or just having a really, really bad day.

Most people aren’t assholes. And even if they are, they’re also human. So don’t walk into a job trying to get anyone fired. Start with kindness. Try to make peace. Assume the best. … and if that doesn’t work, then remember that what goes around comes around. Although it never comes fast enough.

Once you do decide to quit, make sure you leave in the right way. You’ve made a commitment, so follow through and try to finish as much of what you started as possible. Find a natural breakpoint in your project—the next big milestone—and aim to leave then. The longer you’re at a company, and the higher up you are, the longer it will take to transition out. Individual contributors can usually give a few weeks to a couple months of notice. CEOs may need a year or more.

And I want to make it very clear: hating your job is never worth the money.

I need to repeat that: hating your job is never worth whatever raise, title, or perks they throw at you to stay.

Don’t get trapped. Just because you don’t know of any other better options doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There is other money. There are other jobs.

The key to finding them is networking. By that I don’t mean going to a conference and working the room, handing out your business cards or QR codes and cornering potential employers as they try to eat their stack of tiny sandwiches. I just mean make new relationships, beyond business—talk to people outside your bubble. Get to know what else is out there. Meet some new human beings. Networking is something you should be doing constantly—even when you’re happily employed.

And don’t think of networking as a means to an end—as a tit-for-tat exchange where if you do someone a favor they may do you one in return. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being used.

You want to talk to your competitors because you’re all working to solve the same problems and they’re taking a different approach. You want your projects to be successful, so you don’t just talk to your immediate teammates at lunch—you grab lunch with your partners, your customers, their customers, their partners. You talk to everyone: get their ideas and their perspectives. In doing so you may be able to help someone or make a friend or strike up an interesting conversation.

People won’t remember how you started. They’ll remember how you left.

Once you find yourself in a place where you believe in the mission, everything changes. Of course, you may need to quit that job, too. Because once you’re committed to a mission, to an idea—that’s the thing you should stick to. The company is secondary. If you find something that inspires you, then follow the best opportunities to pursue it. I got hooked on personal electronics and followed that passion across five companies. It only became really lucrative at the very end, but it was what I loved to do, so I kept finding new opportunities to do it. Each job took a different angle, a new perspective on the same problem, and eventually I had a rich, 360-degree view of the challenge I wanted to solve and all the possible solutions. The idea was much more precious than the company signing my paychecks.

If the mission you’re excited about is growing dimmer because of internal politics or poor administration or leadership churn or simply bad decisions, don’t be shy. Get to networking. Talk to everyone. Not watercooler talk or internal gossip, not just complaining with no solutions. Come with suggestions to fix the intractable problems that you and your team face. Speak to your manager, HR, other teams—find appropriate leaders who will listen. Hopefully some will agree with you, or challenge your view or help you refine your thinking. It’s all useful. Get their perspectives. That includes senior leadership. Executives. You could even go to board members and investors if you can get ahold of them. That’s what I did—at Philips, at Apple. Get up as high as you can and let them know what the issues are. You’ll probably quit anyway if these issues aren’t solved, so you have nothing to lose.

But if you take this route—if you go around your boss and start making a fuss all over the company—make sure the issues you’re raising are not about yourself.

If you’re going to get everyone’s attention, make sure it’s to support the mission, not for personal gain. Think through the problems that are plaguing your project. Write down thoughtful, insightful solutions. Present them to leadership. Those solutions may not work, but the process will be at the very least educational. Don’t nag, but be persistent, choose your moment wisely, be professional, and don’t hold back about the consequences if you don’t succeed. Tell them you’re passionate about making this job work, but if you can’t solve these issues then you’ll probably quit.

And remember that even if leadership acknowledges that you’re right and promises a major shift, it may take a while for anything to change. Or it may never change. But it’s worth it to try. Quitting anytime things get tough not only doesn’t look great on your résumé, but it also kills any chance you have of making something you’re proud of. Good things take time. Big things take longer. If you flit from project to project, company to company, you’ll never have the vital experience of starting and finishing something meaningful.

Your story about why you left needs to be honest and fair and your story for your next job needs to be inspiring: this is what I want to learn, this is the kind of team I want to work with, this is part of the mission that truly excites me.

They were focused on what they could make, not why anyone would want it. I looked it over and thought: No. Nonono. You can’t use Windows—I’d been bashing my skull against a Microsoft OS for years and knew it was a dead end for consumer electronics. Who wants to wait two minutes for their TV to boot up? And you had to simplify the home theater for nongeeks. Make something that anyone could just plug and play.

One day at the peak of my desperate, scrabbling attempt to fund my company, I had lunch with an old friend from General Magic. I told him what I was working on and what I was struggling with—the swirling, nauseating mix of excitement about what we were creating and the sinking horror that I’d have to shut it all down. He commiserated, ate his sandwich, and wished me well. The following afternoon he had lunch with a colleague who worked at Apple. They mentioned they were kicking off a new project. Did he happen to know anyone with experience building handheld devices? I got a call from Apple the next day.