Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective.

You have to try and fail and learn by doing.

when you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?”

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.

Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.” —ANONYMOUS

If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution.

“I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”

Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.

Don’t worry that your team will outshine you. In fact, it’s your goal. You should always be training someone on your team to do your job. The better they are, the easier it is for you to move up and even start managing managers.

You now lead a team of people doing what you used to be good at.

It became exceedingly obvious that I could never guarantee success through great engineering alone.

I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn. He showed the same level of attention to every piece of hardware, every word on the packaging. That’s how we learned the level of detail that was expected at Apple. And that’s what we started to expect of ourselves.

You need to create a setting where they can surprise you. And where they can surpass you.

You need to let go of taking pride in your individual daily accomplishments and start taking pride in the accrued wins of your team.

People just can’t articulate what they want clearly enough to definitely point in one direction or another,

Customers will always be more comfortable with what exists already, even if it’s terrible.

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

“It’s not data or intuition; it’s data and intuition.”

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.”

The longer you’re at a company, and the higher up you are, the longer it will take to transition out.

Networking is something you should be doing constantly—even when you’re happily employed.

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

You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters.

When a company gives that kind of care and attention to every part of the journey, people notice.

Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it.

find the right balance—not so disruptive that you won’t be able to execute, not so easy to execute that nobody will care.

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.

If you wait for your product to be perfect, you will never finish. But it’s very hard to know when you’re done

You need constraints to make good decisions and the best constraint in the world is time.

Don’t go crazy hiring people just because you can.

Trying to get into that much detail that far out is useless. Something will always spoil your plan.

You typically need to create at least three generations of any new, disruptive product before you get it right and turn a profit.

the teams who were stalling us would get a call from Steve.

You can only have one customer.

do not vacation like Steve Jobs.

He worked harder on vacation than he did in the office.

Every time I left, I’d hand the reins over to a different person who reported to me. It’s your problem now, buddy! It was a time for the team to step up and learn to do what I did.

Part of your job is not to go completely nuts at work and take it out on your team.

you have to engineer your schedule to include these breaks and then hold the line when people try to schedule over them.

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.

if you’re in a crisis then it’s time to be a micromanager again.

You will be incredibly worried, but you can’t tear your hair out—I strongly recommend being bald already.

Forming that team and shepherding it through its many transitions is always the hardest and most rewarding part of building anything.

A near-perfect team is made up of smart, passionate, imperfect people who complement one another.

A thoughtful approach to growth to avoid watering down your culture.

You’ll also need to fire people. Don’t be scared of it, but don’t be callous, either.

But we were careful not to grow too fast. We wanted to hold on to our starting-team DNA

Directors need to think more like a CEO than an individual contributor.

Coaches are there to help with the business. It’s all about the work: this company, this job, this moment in time.