Build Quotes

“Most people are happy with 90 percent good.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“your job is to care.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Your focus, your passion, trickles down.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“It’s the contributions of everyone on the team that ultimately define the melody, that turn noise into a song.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Building a product is like making a song. The band is composed of marketing, sales, engineering, support, manufacturing, PR, legal. And the product manager is the producer—making sure everyone knows the melody, that nobody is out of tune and everyone is doing their part. They’re the only person who can see and hear how all the pieces are coming together, so they can tell when there’s too much bassoon or when a drum solo’s going on too long,”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Your message needs to fit the customer’s context. You can’t say everything everywhere.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Being a good designer is more a way of thinking than a way of drawing.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“change is growth and growth is opportunity.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Planning for a breakpoint is a lot to deal with on top of everything else going on. And it’s the worst kind of planning: messy, difficult, infinitely annoying people stuff. It’s always tempting to leave it for another day. But “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t work here.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Everyone should know what matters at your company—what defines your culture. If you don’t explicitly know your values, you can’t pass them on, maintain them, evolve them, or hire for them.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Culture arises organically but then needs to be codified to be maintained.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“always seek out new ways to disrupt yourself. You can’t only start thinking about it when the competition threatens to catch up or your business begins to stagnate.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Life is the process of elimination”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You’ll need to break your org into product specific groups so that each product gets the attention it deserves.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And you’ll hold on to the people. Today I still work with friends I met at General Magic. At Philips. At Apple. At Nest. The products have changed, the companies have changed, but the relationships haven’t.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“can’t explain it. Just as I never learned their true reasons for selling Nest, I never heard an explanation for why they decided to keep it. Maybe the fact that Amazon was interested made Larry realize that Nest was a valuable asset after all. Maybe it was all an elaborate game of chicken to get me to toe the line and cut costs. Maybe they never had a real plan to begin with and this all happened because of some exec’s casual whim. You’d be surprised how often that’s the reason behind major changes.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The thread that tied all these people and teams and pains and desires together was product management. For every successful product and company, all parts of your business end up leading back to them—it’s all hinged together in one central point. This is why product managers are the hardest people to hire and train.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The thread that tied all these people and teams and pains and desires together was product management. For every successful product and company, all parts of your business end up leading back to them—it’s all hinged together in one central point. This is why product managers are”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“engineering, marketing, finance, sales, customer support, and legal”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Commuters like Sarah only use the iPod going to and from work, students like Tom use it throughout the day, but in short bursts between classes or basketball games. We created typical customer personas,”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Why We Made It page on nest.com.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“When building a product, product management and the marketing team should be working together from the very beginning. As you build, you should continue to use marketing to evolve the story and ensure they have a voice in what the product becomes.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Each product family gets a dedicated engineering team, a dedicated marketing person, a dedicated designer and writer. And that turns them into little startups inside the business—smaller, faster, more autonomous.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Only after we got through this important subject could we move on to anything else—like what the hell we were building.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Every Monday morning at Nest, that’s how my management meetings started: Who are the great people we want to hire? Are we making our hiring goals or retention metrics? If not, what’s the problem? What are the roadblocks? And how is the team doing? What issues do people have? How are performance reviews going? Who needs a bonus? How are we going to celebrate these accomplishments so the team feels valued? And, most importantly, are people leaving?”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You’re B2B2C, but don’t lose your mission as you navigate your acronym. The Bs matter, but without the C you have nothing. Now it’s their “Golden Rule”: Our Only Customer Is The Fan. And they make sure the venues and artists believe it, too. They remind them, continually, that if DICE does right by the fans, everything else will follow. The artists, the venues, DICE—they all have one master in the end: the person buying the concert ticket. The human being who just wants to see a great show.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The potential company-destroying problems—and the steps to mitigate them—went on and on. But listing them out, breaking them down, talking honestly about them,”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“your product still has to learn how to crawl, and then walk, before it can run.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Build the product, then add the services.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making