Jason JunJason Jun

Build

Tony Fadell

Probably the best book on product building I've read in a long time. I initially picked it up for the behind-the-scenes stories on Apple's product development and Steve Jobs anecdotes. It fills gaps left by other books on iPod and iPhone creation.

The book offers practical advice for entrepreneurs, though I'm not the target audience. I still enjoyed learning about the messy process behind great products. It's more interesting than just using the final products. The struggles during Nest's merger with Google were surprising, and the author's frankness makes his dissatisfaction clear, especially compared to his tone on Apple and Steve Jobs.

Highlights

The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.

I needed to learn. And the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who knew exactly how hard it was to make something great—who had the scars to prove it.

...if you’ve got the tech, then you still have to time it right. The world has to be ready to want it.

I knew there was room for something amazing between desktop computers and cell phones. I saw it, felt it, when I was at General Magic. So I built a team to make devices at Philips and then started my own company to make digital music players. I stuck with it because I loved it—loved building the whole system from the bottom up, the atoms and electrons, the hardware and software and networks and design. And by the time Apple called me to make the iPod, I knew exactly how to do it.

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.

Follow your curiosity. Once you’re armed with that knowledge, then you can start hunting down the people who are the best of the best and trying to work with them.

It became exceedingly obvious that I could never guarantee success through great engineering alone. The best technology wouldn’t always win—look at Windows 95 versus Mac OS.

Many people don’t have either a good gut instinct to 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.

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

Instead of moving forward with a design, you’d hear, “Well, let’s just test it.” Nobody wanted to take responsibility for what they were making.

The data wasn’t a guide. At best, it was a crutch. At worst, cement shoes. It was analysis paralysis.

If you’re testing the core of your product, if the basic functionality can flex and change depending on the whims of an A/B test, then there is no core. There’s a hole where your product vision should be and you’re just shoveling data into the void.

Take people’s input. Listen, don’t react.

Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them. Because if you follow your gut and your gut is wrong, then there’s nowhere else to cast blame. But if all you did was follow the data and you still failed, then clearly something else was wrong. Someone else screwed up.

As the brilliant, empathetic, refreshingly insightful, and egoless designer Ivy Ross, vice president of hardware design at Google, has said, “It’s not data or intuition; it’s data and intuition.” You need both. You use both. And sometimes the data can only take you so far. In those moments, all you can do is take a leap. Just don’t look down.

And I want to make it very clear: hating your job is never worth the money. I need to repeat that: hating your job is never worth whatever raise, title, or perks they throw at you to stay.

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

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.

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.

Once you have a strong answer for why your product is needed, then you can focus on how it works.

He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again.

Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it.

At one point we came to Steve with radically new designs that we were really excited about—they were smaller and lighter, innovative and beautiful. And we’d removed the click wheel. He looked at them and said, “They’re great. But you’ve lost what it means to be an iPod.”

To maintain the core of your product there are usually one or two things that have to stay still while everything else spins and changes around them.

The marketing team fought Steve Jobs the hardest about the iPhone keyboard. But a lot of us rebelled. In 2005 the most popular “smart” phone by far was the BlackBerry—fondly known as the Crackberry. People were addicted. BlackBerry owned 25 percent of the market and was growing fast. And the BlackBerry die-hards would always tell you that the very best thing about their very favorite gadget was obvious. It was the keyboard.

Most people don’t realize what the iPod was originally built for. Its purpose wasn’t just to play music—it was made to sell Macintosh computers. That’s what was in Steve Jobs’s head: We’re going to make something amazing that will only work with our Macs. People will love it so much that they’ll start buying Macs again.

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

We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team. That last point is important.

And in order to keep the project heartbeat going, every team will need to produce its own deliverables at its own pace. Each team’s heartbeat will be different—it could be six-week sprints or weekly reviews or daily check-ins. It could be scrum or waterfall or kanban, whatever organizational framework or project management approach works for you. A creative team is going to have a very different heartbeat than an engineering team; a company that makes hardware is going to have slower team rhythms than companies that only push around electrons. It doesn’t matter what that heartbeat is, your job is to keep it steady so your team knows what’s expected of them.

Nobody can accurately estimate their time or all the steps they’ll need to perform. Trying to get into that much detail that far out is useless. Something will always spoil your plan. We were spending all our time scheduling, arguing over what could and couldn’t be done in a half day, and it was impossible to see the whole forest through the half trees.

Starting a company is unfathomably stressful and a truly ungodly amount of work and sacrifice. You need a partner who can balance you out, who you can call at 2 a.m. because you know they’ll be awake, working on your startup, too.

Many startups are founded by entrepreneurs who just left big companies. They saw a need, pitched their bosses, got rejected, then struck out on their own.

The best teams are multigenerational—Nest employed twenty-year-olds and seventy-year-olds.

In an interview I’m always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?”

If you have fifty people who understand your culture and add a hundred who don’t, you will lose that culture. It’s just math.

By far the hardest part of growth is finding the best people—in all their different incarnations—trusting your team to hire them, then making sure they’re happy and thriving.

What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.

But good marketing isn’t bullshitting. It’s not about making something up, crafting a fiction, exaggerating your product’s benefits, and burying its faults. Steve Jobs often said, “The best marketing is just telling the truth.” If the messaging rings true, then the marketing is better. You don’t have to rely on bells and whistles, stunts, and dancing polar bears—you simply explain in the best way possible what you’re making and why you’re making it.

Your messaging is your product. The story you’re telling shapes the thing you’re making.

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.

Steve took a lot of risks, made bad decisions, launched products that didn’t work—the original Apple III, the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the list goes on. But if you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough. He learned from the screwups, was constantly improving, and his good ideas, his successes, totally wiped away his failures. He was constantly pushing the company to learn and try new things.

My advice is to always be cautiously optimistic. Trust, but verify.

In the end, there are two things that matter: products and people. What you build and who you build it with.

But even if your product is dead or your company is dead, what you’ve made still matters. It still counts. You’ll walk away having created something you’re proud of.