Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

Apple’s hardware was a tiny piece of the puzzle that these CIOs needed to make a purchase decision. The server team twisted themselves into knots trying to force an unnatural pairing—an Apple tree trying to grow an orange—until the iPod took off and saved the company and the server project was blessedly cancelled.

Is your customer Jim the Millennial, who saw your ad on Instagram then bought your product as a Christmas present for his sister? Or is it Jane the CIO of a Fortune 500 company who answered a cold email from your sales team, negotiated pricing and different product features for months, and now needs a team of customer success agents to train the five thousand employees under her? You cannot hold both those people in your head at the same time. You cannot make a single product for two completely opposite customers—for two different customer journeys. Not when you’re making technology. Or services. Or a store. Not even if you’re making dinner. It’s a hard rule.

if you cater to both, your marketing still has to be B2C. You can never convince a regular person to use a B2B product that’s obviously not meant for them, but you can convince a company to use your product if you appeal to the human beings inside that company. That’s ultimately how, despite itself, Apple found itself firmly in the enterprise.

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.

To withstand a complete lack of true work/life balance requires a clear organizational strategy. You need to prioritize. It’s important to have everything you need to think about written down and have a plan for when and how you’ll bring it up with your team. Otherwise it will swirl around in your brain endlessly, killing any meager chance you have of relaxing your shoulders for a minute.

I needed to calm down. I needed to find space. I needed to prioritize. Everyone thought I was crazy—and many still do—but here’s what I did: I took several sheets of paper with me everywhere. They had all the top milestones in front of us for each of the disciplines—engineering, HR, finance, legal, marketing, facilities, etc.—and everything we needed to do to reach those milestones. Every top-level question that I had was on those papers. So when I was in a meeting or talking to someone, I could quickly scan it. What are my top issues? What issues do our customers have? What’s the current roadblock for this person’s team? What are the next major milestones? What date commitments did our teams make? And then there was the best part—the ideas. Whenever someone had a great idea that we had to table for the moment—an improvement to the product or the organization—I’d write it down. So right next to the list of that week’s to-dos and tasks, there was a working library of all the things we couldn’t wait to begin. I’d regularly read them to myself and see if they still applied. It kept me inspired and excited and focused on the future. And it was great for the team. They saw that I paid attention to their ideas and made sure we kept thinking about them. The only way for me to capture all of it—good ideas, priorities, roadblocks, the dates that people promised to deliver, and the major internal and external heartbeats ahead—was to take notes in every meeting. Longhand. Not on a co...

It wasn’t micromanagement. It was holding people accountable. It was holding everything in my head at the same time. It was holding on for dear life amid the flood of everything I needed to remember. It started as a one-sheeter. Eventually it grew to eight pages, ten pages. It was labor intensive. Arcane. Never-ending. But it worked. And eventually my team grew to appreciate it. It kept me (relatively) calm. It helped me focus. And nobody ever had to wonder where my head was at. Everyone always knew what mattered to me—they had my priorities in writing, updated, every week. A lot of them have picked up the practice themselves, and the people who worked for them have done the same. Everyone dreaded the list, the email, the meeting—until they too had too much in their brains. Until they needed a way to manage it.

There’s a reason Steve Jobs famously always walked between meetings, during meetings. It helped him think, stay creative, to rummage, but it also forced him to take some time to just … walk. To take a break from sitting in meetings, even if it was just for a few minutes. So look at your calendar. Engineer it. Design it. Lay out the next three to six months on paper. Write down what a typical day looks like. And what a typical week or two weeks look like. Keep going for the next month. And then the next six. Now start to reengineer your day, your week, and your monthly schedule with time dedicated to feeling human. It could be ten minutes after lunch where you read an interesting Medium article or six months from now when you take a week under a palm tree. But you have to engineer your schedule to include these breaks and then hold the line when people try to schedule over them. So what will you do every few days or every week or two? Every 8–12 weeks?

In the long term, you need to plan some vacations. In the short term, here’s what I recommend: 2–3 times a week—Block out parts of your schedule during your workday so you have time to think and reflect. Meditate. Read the news on some subject you don’t work on. Whatever. It can even be tangential to your work, but it should not be actual work. Give your brain a second to catch up. Learn, stay curious, don’t just react to the never-ending stream of fires to put out or meetings to attend. 4–6 times a week—Exercise. Get up. Go biking or running or weight lifting or cross-training or just take a walk. I started getting into yoga at Philips and I’ve kept it up for more than twenty-five years—it’s been hugely helpful. You have to quiet everything around you and focus to do yoga poses properly. You become conscious of your body so you instantly know if you’re off. Find something like that—where you’ll notice if you’re physically or emotionally at a breaking point and will have an opportunity to right yourself before it gets too bad. Eat well—You are an extreme athlete, but your sport is work. So fuel yourself. Don’t eat too much, don’t eat too late, cut down on refined sugars, smoking, alcohol. Just try to keep yourself from physically feeling like garbage. And if all this seems great in theory but completely impossible in practice because you can barely keep up with your emails, let alone make time to go to the gym or block out whole months of your life, then you may need to ad...

If you’re fairly high level (director or above) at a fairly large company managing a fairly large team, then you should consider an assistant. If you’re a CEO of...

Just remember, there’s no perfect assistant who will be able to read your mind immediately. What you’re looking for is someone who won’t gossip about you or the company but who will be friendly with everyone on the team so they can funnel worrisome gossip your way. You want someone who learns fast, only needs to be told once, and who, over time, can anticipate your needs and fix problems before they ever hit your desk. It can take three to six months for them to get a handle on how to be most helpful, but then it truly feels like you have a new superpower. It’s like you’ve

gained another limb, or another six hours in the day. This person isn’t just an employee. They’re a partner. So don’t fall into the stupid movie trope of using them as a lackey.

Sometimes when I just knew things were headed inexorably downhill, I left the office, rescheduled my meetings, and said, “Today is just one of those days—don’t make it worse than it already is.” There are moments where you simply cannot function as a human, never mind a leader, and you need to recognize them and walk out the door. Don’t make a bad decision because you’re frustrated and overworked—get your head on straight and come in fresh the next day.

You will encounter a crisis eventually. Everyone does. If you don’t, you’re not doing anything important or pushing any boundaries. When you’re creating something disruptive and new, you will at some point be blindsided by a complete disaster.

It may be an external crisis that you have no control over, or an internal screwup or just the kinds of growing pains that hit every company. [See also: Chapter 5.2: Breakpoints.] Either way, when the time comes, here’s the basic playbook: 1. Keep your focus on how to fix the problem, not who to blame. That will come later and is far too distracting early on. 2. As a leader, you’ll have to get into the weeds. Don’t be worried about micromanagement—as the crisis unfolds your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it. However, very quickly after everyone has calmed down and gotten to work, let them do their jobs without you breathing down their necks. 3. Get advice. From mentors, investors, your board, or anyone else you know who’s gone through something similar. Don’t try to solve your problems alone. 4. Your job once people get over the initial shock will be constant communication. You need to talktalktalk (with your team, the rest of the company, the board, investors, and potentially press and customers) and listenlistenlisten (hear what your team is worried about and the issues that are bubbling up, calm down panicked employees and stressed-out PR people). Don’t worry about overcommunicating. 5. It doesn’t matter if the crisis was caused by your mistake or your team or a fluke accident: accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize.