Build Quotes

“When you don’t prepare for breakpoints—don’t warn the team, don’t thoughtfully restructure the org around roles first and individuals second, don’t add new managers, don’t reassess your meetings and communication tools, don’t give people access to training or coaches, don’t actively work to preserve your culture—then the consequences are clear: In their quest to keep people happy, I’ve seen leaders build their org around existing employees instead of first figuring out what the optimal structure should be and fitting their team into those roles. Then roles and responsibilities overlap, there’s a ton of redundancy in the upper levels, they have to invent weird new titles for people, and nobody knows what they should be working on. Work slows to a crawl. Employees complain that the culture is dead. People start to quit. Panic sets in and it can feel like a full-blown crisis.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“It’s your responsibility as a leader not to try to deal with a disaster on your own.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The only thing you can do is calmly say, “Yes. I’m worried. Just like you. This is scary. But we’ll get through it. We’ve faced other challenges in the past together and succeeded. Here’s the plan.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Continually reprioritizing allowed me to zoom out and see what could be combined or eliminated. It let me spot moments when we were trying to do too much.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Nobody believed we’d be able to pull it together in time to get it to customers by Christmas. But I had just come off four years at Philips, where more than 90 percent of projects got cancelled and killed. If you didn’t make your mark fast enough or your project ran into issues or dragged on, Philips corporate would descend upon you, ready to “save the business” from your mistake or steal it out from under you.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“follow or the faith in themselves to follow it. It takes time to develop that trust. So they try to turn an opinion-driven business decision into a data-driven one. But data can’t solve an opinion-based problem. So no matter how much data you get, it will always be inconclusive. This leads to analysis paralysis—death by overthinking.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“What you do matters. Where you work matters. Most importantly, who you work with and learn from matters. Too many people see work as a means to an end, as a way to make enough money to stop working. But getting a job is your opportunity to make a dent in the world. To put your focus and energy and your precious, precious time toward something meaningful. You don’t have to be an executive right away, you don’t have to get a job at the most amazing, world-changing company right out of college, but you should have a goal.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“crossing the chasm isn’t a guarantee, even with much-loved products.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“despite the many differences between atoms and electrons, hardware and software, there is one thing that has the exact same stranglehold on both: time. No matter what you’re building, reaching profitability will take longer than you think. You will almost”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“To write a good press release you have to focus. The press release is meant to hook people—it’s how you get journalists interested in what you’re making. You have to catch their attention. You have to be succinct and interesting, highlight the most important and essential things that your product can do. You can’t just list everything you want to make—you have to prioritize. When you write a press release you say, “Here. This. This is what’s newsworthy. This is what really matters.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Steve was a master of this. Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it. And he made it all look so natural, so easy.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You can’t just hit customers on the head with the “what” before you tell them the “why.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Prototype as much of the full customer experience as possible. Make the intangible tangible so you can’t overlook the less showy but incredibly important parts of the journey.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“People are easily distracted. We’re wired to focus our attention on tangible things that we can see and touch to the point that we overlook the importance of intangible experiences and feelings.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. 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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for human beings.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The CEO and executive team are mostly staring way out on the horizon—50 percent of their time is spent planning for a fuzzy, distant future months or years away, 25 percent is focused on upcoming milestones in the next month or two, and the last 25 percent is spent putting out fires happening right now at their”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“This is an adventure and adventures never go according to plan. That’s what makes them fun. And scary. And worth doing.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“I don’t regret selling Nest to Google. Neither does our executive team. We always revisit this question when our old team meets up. Our only regret is that we didn’t get to finish what we started. But we made the decision to sell together, and we all stand by it today. Given the data we had at the time, we’d do it again. Especially since we were right. As predicted, once Nest brought the idea of the connected home to life, the giants of Apple, Amazon, and Samsung all wanted a piece. They built teams to compete with Google and Nest and created their own home products, platforms, and ecosystems. We dodged a bullet. And Google was and remains an incredible company. It’s filled with brilliant people at every level. It’s changed the world many times over. Google’s culture works for them—there’s a reason a lot of people never leave the mother ship. But that culture is enabled and driven by the fact that Google’s search and advertising business pretty much prints cash. Even Googlers call it the “Money Tree.” It’s turned Google into a place of wild abundance where anyone can more or less do anything—or sometimes nothing at all. They’ve been so profitable for so long and have had so few existential business threats that they’ve never had to cut back or slim down, never had to be scrappy. They haven’t had to really fight for anything in decades. Lucky them! But at Nest, we were fighters. Our culture was born from the Apple way, a culture that survived multiple near-death experiences over its forty-plus years of existence. We were ready to fight for our mission and our place at the table, fight to keep our culture and our way of doing things.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Shift customer expectations. Set the standard higher.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“being CEO is a hard job—stressful, busy, high-pressure. But the stress is one thing; the isolation is another.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Delaying hard decisions, hoping problems will resolve themselves,”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“In this job, respect is always more important than being liked.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“They hold people (and themselves) accountable and drive for results.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And if you’re not an expert at internal software tools or PR or analytics or growth or whatever needs you to have an opinion today—if you’re not sure what’s great and what’s just okay—then ask questions.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You don’t have to be an expert in everything. You just have to care about it.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You can prioritize, but nothing ever comes off the list. Avoiding or ignoring any part of your company only comes back to haunt you sooner or later.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“don’t worry about picking your battles.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“all that attention, that care, the quest for perfection—they’ll raise the team’s own standards. What they expect of themselves.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making