Build Quotes

“Turns out we weren’t missing anything—but our testers were. They spent the first thirty minutes looking for tools—the wire stripper, the flathead screwdriver; no, wait, we need a Phillips. Where did I put that little one again? Once they got everything they needed, the rest of the installation flew by. Twenty, thirty minutes tops.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“But every time they opened the random-stuff drawer in their kitchen, they’d see the cute little Nest screwdriver. And they’d smile. Every time they’d need to replace the batteries in their kid’s toy car, they’d grab our screwdriver. And suddenly the screwdriver became the toy and the car was forgotten. We knew it wasn’t just a hardware tool—it was a marketing tool. It helped customers remember Nest. It helped them fall in love.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“We took everything we’d learned about the industry and Nest’s potential customers, about demographics and psychographics, and we created two distinct personas. One was a woman and the other a man. The man was into technology, loved his iPhone, was always looking for cool new gadgets. The woman was the decider—she dictated what made it into the house and what got returned. She loved beautiful things, too, but was skeptical of super-new, untested technology. We gave them names and faces. We made a mood board of their home, their kids, their interests, their jobs. We knew what brands they loved and what drove them crazy about their house and how much money they spent on heating bills in the winter. We needed to look through their eyes to understand why the man might pick up the box. And so we could convince the woman to keep it. Over time we added more personas—couples, families, roommates—as we better understood our customers. But in the beginning we started with two—two human beings who everyone could imagine, whose photos they could touch. That’s how prototyping works. It’s how you make abstract concepts into physical representations. You turn your messaging architecture into words and pictures on a box. [See also: Figure 5.4.1, in Chapter 5.4.] You turn “someone in a store” into Beth from Pennsylvania. And then you keep going. Every step of the way, along every link of the chain.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“To do that right, you have to prototype the whole experience—give every part the weight and reality of a physical object. Regardless of whether your product is made of atoms or bits or both, the process is the same. Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in rough wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Create detailed mock-ups that show how a customer would travel from an ad to the website to the app and what information they would see at each touchpoint. Write up the reactions you’d want to get from early adopters, the headlines you’d want to see from reviewers, the feelings you want to evoke in everyone. Make it visible. Physical. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch. And don’t wait until your product is done to get started—map out the whole journey as you map out what your product will do.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The thermostat was important, of course, but it occupied only a tiny fraction of the customer journey: 10% of our customers’ experience was the website, advertising, packaging, and in-store display: first we had to convince people to buy it or at least consider and research it. 10% was installation: following the instructions to get it onto your wall with minimal nervousness and power outages. 10% was looking at and touching the device: it had to be beautiful so people would want it in their homes. But after a week it learned what you liked and when you were away, so you didn’t really need to touch it much. If we did our job right, customers would only interact with it here and there, during unexpected cold snaps or heat waves. 70% of the customer experience was on people’s phones or laptops: you’d open the app to turn up the heat on the way home, or you’d see how long the AC was on in Energy History, or you’d tweak your schedule. Then you’d check your email and see a summary of how much energy you used that month. And if you had an issue, you’d go to our website and use the online troubleshooter or read a support article. If we didn’t execute well on any one of these parts of the customer experience, Nest would have failed. Each phase of the journey has to be great in order to move customers naturally into the next, to overcome the moments of friction between them.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Don’t tell me what’s so special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.” Your product isn’t only your product. It’s the whole user experience—a chain that begins when someone learns about your brand for the first time and ends when your product disappears from their life, returned or thrown away, sold to a friend or deleted in a burst of electrons.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“So don’t just make a prototype of your product and think you’re done. 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. 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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

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

“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 should talk to people and make connections because you’re naturally curious. You want to know how other teams at your company work and what people do. 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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

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

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

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

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

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

“If it had been 2016 rather than 1996, we would have leaned into A/B testing—the omnipresent tool of the internet age. A/B testing just means running a digital experiment where you test option A versus option B with customers. So some see a blue button, some see an orange button, and you see which button gets the most clicks. It’s an incredible tool—infinitely faster than customer panels and so much easier to interpret.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The customer is always right, right? 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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

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

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

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

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

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

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

“least 85 percent of your time should be spent managing. If it’s not, then you aren’t doing it right. Managing is the job. And managing is hard.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“6. 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”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“3. Becoming a manager is a discipline. Management is a learned skill, not a talent. You’re not born with it. You’ll need to learn a whole slew of new communication skills and educate yourself with websites, podcasts, books, classes, or help from mentors and other experienced managers.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. You’ll no longer be doing the things you do really well—instead you’ll be digging into how others do them, helping them improve. Your job will now be communication, communication, communication, recruiting, hiring and firing, setting budgets, reviews, one-on-one meetings (1:1s), meetings with your team and other teams and leadership, representing your team in those meetings, setting goals and keeping people on track, conflict resolution, helping to find creative solutions to intractable problems, blocking and tackling political BS, mentoring your team, and asking “how can I help you?” all the time.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Your executive team and managers are supposed to be looking out for roadblocks. They’re supposed to warn you so you can adjust course, or at least grab a helmet. But sometimes they don’t. So 20 percent of the time, individual contributors need to look up. And they need to look around. The sooner they start, the faster and higher they’ll advance in their career.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Junior individual contributors spend 80 percent of their time looking straight down—maybe a week or two out—to see the fine points of their day-to-day work. In the early stages of your career, that’s the way it should be. You should be focused on getting your specific piece of each project done, done well, and out the door.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Managers usually keep their eyes focused 2–6 weeks out. Those projects are pretty fleshed out and detailed, though they still have some fuzzy bits around the edges. Managers’ heads should be on a swivel—they often look down, sometimes look further out, and spend a fair amount of time looking side to side, checking in on other teams, making sure everything’s coming together for the next milestone.”
― 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 feet. They also look at all the parallel lines to make sure everyone is keeping up and going in the same direction.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making