Read "Build" and Make Things Worth Making

Tony Fadell’s “Build” is excellent. It’s a guide for start-ups on how to create a great product and a great company, a book on management and managing people, an introspective overview of a founder/product manager’s life, a story filled with advice on doing what you love, an insider’s report on the development of the iPod, iPhone and Nest products, and a rant on when to stop serving cake for every employee birthday.

"Build" is a book I wish I had read when I started building websites mumble-mumble years ago, but it took all those years for Fadell to accumulate the wisdom he shares.

On staying aware of the work going on around you:

“If an IC (individual contributor) is constantly looking down, their eyes exclusively on their own tight deadlines and the minutiae of their job, they may walk directly into a brick wall.”

On being a disruptor:

“Even starting something new in a big company won’t protect you. You’ll have to deal with politics, jealousy, and fear. You’re trying to change things, and 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.”

On taking your time when vetting ideas:

“Before you commit to executing on an idea--to starting a company or launching a new product--you should commit to researching it and trying it out first. Practice delayed intuition. This is a phrase coined by the brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman to describe the simple concept that to make better decisions, you need to slow down.”

On customer listening:

“When attention and focus shift away from the consumer and toward the businesses bringing in the real money, companies go down some very dark alleys.”

On building great teams:

“The best teams are multigenerational--Nest employed twenty-year-olds and seventy-year-olds. Experienced people have a wealth of wisdom that they can pass onto the next generation and young people can push back against long-held assumptions.”

On realizing a company has grown too big for cake at every birthday party:

“When you have a team of three hundred, there’s a birthday practically every day. Should we still celebrate each one? The whole team can’t keep taking the afternoon off. And do you still get cake? Is cake important to your culture? You want to do everything you can for your team but there are hard realities. There are deadlines. There are budgets. And people are expensing a lot of goddamn cake.

“The cake is a microcosm of the larger problems of growth, but I’m also speaking literally. Turns out people get weirdly defensive about cake. It’s always a mini-crisis when you have to stop having all-company birthday parties for individual employees.”

On what matters:

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

It’s a good read and an excellent book for anyone who wants to build great products.

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BTW, I learned about “Build” from Lenny’s podcast interview with Marty Cagan, who said it was one of his favorite new books.