Build by Tony Fadell

I finished this book in December 2025. I recommend this book 7/10.

Why you should read this book:

Tony Fadell is the father of Apple's iPod, iPhone, and Google Nest. In this book, he breaks down his journey from geek to CEO and provides some good insights on how to put the customer first.

Get your copy here.

🚀 The book in three sentences

1. Work with all teams across the organization

2. Focus on the customer experience, always, and ask their questions

3. Press-release + Make a Master-list

📝 My notes and thoughts

• P26. If an IC is constantly looking down, their eyes exclusively on their own thought deadlines and the minutiae of their job, they may walk directly into a brick wall. As an IC, you need to occasionally do two things:

  • Look up: Look beyond the next deadline or project and forward to all the milestones coming up in the next few months. Then look all the way down to your ultimate goal: the mission. Ideally, it should be the reason you joined the project in the first place. As your project progresses, be sure the mission still makes sense to you and that the path to reach it seems achievable.

  • Look around: Get out of your comfort zone and away from the immediate team you're on. Talk to the other functions in your company to understand their perspectives, needs, and concerns. This internal networking is always useful, and it can give you an early warning if your project is not headed in the right direction.

• P29. 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. 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.

• P32. She wanted to know what was happening behind the scenes—not just what she was hearing from leadership. Where will wireless messaging work? Where won't it work? What's the customer experience really going to be? What are the trade-offs? I told her. Then I asked what she thought. And that's when I noticed the sky was falling. I hadn't realized it, but all those people working parallel to me could see things I couldn't. They had a completely different view of our world—a view that I wanted to understand. New perspectives are everywhere. You don't have to drag a bunch of people off the street to stare at your product and tell you what they think. Start with your internal customers. Everyone in a company has customers, even if they're not building anything. You're always making something for someone—the creative team is making stuff for marketing, marketing is making stuff for the app designer, the app designers are making stuff for the engineers—every single person in the company is doing something for someone, even if it's just a coworker on another team. You're somebody's customer, too—so talk to whoever is doing work for you. Show up with something of value or a pertinent question. Try to understand what their roadblocks are and what they're excited about. And talk to the people who are closest to the customer, like marketing and support—find teams who communicate with customers day in and day out and hear their feedback directly. Come curious. And come genuinely interested. When you're looking up and around, you're not on a self-serving mission to understand if your company will fail and how quickly you should cut and run. You're trying to understand how to do your job better. You're getting ideas on how to help your project and your company's mission succeed. You're starting to think like your manager or leader, which is the first step to becoming a manager or leader. And as you do that, you may start seeing things emerge from the haze. Hard things. Brick-wall-like things.

• P49. I learned how to back off—at least a little bit. 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—they give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine. But you can't overdo it—you can't create so much space that you lose track of what's going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can't let it slide into mediocrity because you're worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren't on the product, they should still be on the wheel. 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. That's how we learned the level of detail that was expected at Apple. And that's what we started to expect of ourselves. As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team's business. When you get deep into the team's process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that's when you dive headfirst into micromanagement.

• P50. The other place where you'll get useful data is in 1:1s with team members. It's all too easy to turn 1:1s into friendly chats that go nowhere, so just as you need to have a process for your team meetings, your weekly meetings with individuals should have an agenda, a clear purpose, and should be beneficial to both sides. You should get the info you need about product development, and your team members should get insight into how they're doing. Try to see the situation from their point of view—talk about their fears and your own concerns out loud, reframe your thoughts so they can hear the feedback, understand the goals, and clear up ambiguities or concerns. And don't be scared of admitting that you don't know all the answers. You can say, "Help me." If you're a first-time manager or simply new to the company or group, just tell people. "I'm doing this for the first time. I'm still learning. Please tell me what I can do to make things better."

• P54. 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. A lot of people resist that idea—they don't want to hire people to do their jobs, and hiring someone who can do your job better than you is even terrifying. It's something I hear from new startup CEOs over and over: "Well, if I hire someone to do that ... then what am I going to do?!" And the answer, of course, is that whatever you're hiring for isn't your job anymore. If you're a manager or a leader or a CEO, then your job is to be a manager or a leader or a CEO. You need to let go of taking pride in your individual daily accomplishments and start taking pride in the accrued wins for your team.

• P64. So don't just hit them with the classic "This is Jane, this is her life, and this is how her life changes when she uses our product" slide. Helping people see things from the customer's perspective is a critical tool, but it's just part of what you need to do. Your job is this moment is to craft a narrative that convinces leadership that your gut is trustworthy, that you've found all the data that could be gleaned, that you have a track record of good decisions, that you grasp the decision makers' fears and are mitigating those risk, that you truly understand your customers and their needs and —most importantly—that what you're proposing will have a positive impact on the business. If you tell that story well, if you bring people along with you on that journey, then they will follow your vision, even if there's no hard data to back you up.

• P79. 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, make a friend, or strike up an interesting conversation.

• P99. 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. There are bumps between Awareness and Acquisition, between Onboarding and Usage, between every phrase of the journey, that you have to help customers over. In each of these moments, the customer asks, "Why?"

  • Why should I care?

  • What should I buy it?

  • Why should I use it?

  • Why should I stick with it?

  • Why should I buy the next version?

• P116. If you're going to pour your heart into creating something new, then that thing should be disruptive. It should be bold. It should change something. It doesn't have to be a product—Amazon was a disruptive service long before they got into making their own hardware. You can disrupt how things are sold, delivered, serviced, and financed. You can disrupt how they're marketed or recycled. Disruption should be important for you personally—who doesn't want to do something exciting and meaningful?—but it's also important for the health of your business. If you're truly making something disruptive, your competition probably won't be able to replicate it quickly.

• P136. Here's the trick: write a press release. But don't write it when you're done. Write it when you start. I began doing this at Apple and eventually realized other leaders had figured it out, too (looking at you, Bezos). It's an incredibly useful tool to narrow down what really matters. 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, highlighting 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." So spend some time developing as great a press release as you can. Consult with marketing and PR people if you have to. They'll help you trim it down to the essentials. Then weeks or months or years later, as you're getting close to finishing, as you're debating what makes it in, what gets cut, what matters, what doesn't—take out your press release. Read it.

• P149. Predictability allows you to codify a product development process rather than starting from scratch every time. It allows you to create a living document with checkpoints, milestones, schedules, and plans that train new employees and teach everyone: This is how we do it. This is the framework for how to build a product. Ultimately, that predictability is how you'll actually make your deadline. (I should create checkpoints in our FY27 plan.)

• P210. Everyone thought I was crazy—and many still do—but here's what I did: I took several sheets of paper with me everywhere. They had all the top milestones in front of us for each of the disciplines—engineering, HR, finance, legal, marketing, facilities, etc.—and everything we needed to do to reach those milestones. Every top-level question that I had was on those papers. So when I was in a meeting or talking to someone, I could quickly scan it. What are my top issues? What issues do our customers have? What are the current roadblocks for this person's team? What are the next major milestones? What date commitments did our teams make? And then there was the best part—the ideas. Whenever someone had a great idea that we had to table for the moment—an improvement to the product or the organization—I'd write it down. So right next to the list of that week's to-dos and tasks, there was a working library of all the things we couldn't wait to begin. I'd regularly read them to myself and see if they still applied. It kept me inspired, excited, and focused on the future. And it was great for the team. They saw that I paid attention to their ideas and made sure we kept thinking about them. The only way for me to capture all of it—good ideas, priorities, roadblocks, the dates that people promised to deliver, and the major internal and external heartbeats ahead—was to take notes in every meeting. Longhand. Not on a computer. Writing by hand was important for me. I wasn't staring at a screen, getting distracted by my email. A computer or a smartphone between you and the team is a huge barrier to focus and send a clear message to everyone in the meeting: whatever I'm looking at on my screen is more important than you. Even just taking notes on a computer was a nonstarter. Sometimes when I'm typing I just ... type. Whatever I'm writing down doesn't make it all the way to my brain. But there was too much on the line for me to zone out, to not hear every word my team was saying. The act of using a pen, then retyping and editing later, forced me to process information differently. Every Sunday evening, I would go through my notes, reassess and reprioritize all my tasks, rifle through the good ideas, then update those papers on the computer and print out a new version for the week. 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. Those were the evenings when I'd realize why we were so overwhelmed—we had said "yes" to too many things, and we needed to start saying "no." And then came the hard work of figuring out what had to be delegated, what had to be delayed, and what had to be crossed off the list. I was forced to prioritize based on what really mattered, as opposed to what was just top of mind. That let me keep my eye on the bigger goals and milestones ahead of us, not just the fires at our feet or whatever feature we were most excited about that day. Then, on Sunday night, I'd email the whole list out to my management team. Each item had a name attached to it. Everyone could look at the top of the list to see what I'd be focused on that week, what they were accountable for, and what the next major milestones were. And every Monday, we'd have a meeting about it. Everyone hated it. I literally watched people flinch when I'd bring out the papers, scanning them for the thing I'd been asking about for weeks. That thing I'd refuse to forget about because it hadn't gotten crossed off the list yet. On June 3, you said it would be ready by the end of the month. It's now July—what's the status of this project? It wasn't micromanagement. It was holding people accountable. It was holding everything in my head at the same time. It was holding on to dear life amid the flood of everything I needed to remember. It started as a one-sheeter. Eventually, it grew to eight pages, ten pages. It was labor-intensive. Arcane. Never-ending. But it worked.

• P217. Sometimes the pressure, stress, and never-ending list and never-ending meetings will become too much. In those moments, get the hell out. Take a walk. Sometimes when I just know things were headed inexorably downhill, I left the office, rescheduled my meetings, and said, "Today is just one of those days—don't make it worse than it already is." There are moments where you simply cannot function as a human, never mind a leader, and you need to recognize them and walk out the door. Don't make a bad decision because you're frustrated and overworked—get your head on straight and come in fresh the next day. None of this is revolutionary. You probably learned it in elementary school: write down a list of what you need to do, take a deep breath, and some quiet time if you're upset, eat your vegetables, exercise, and sleep. But you'll forget. We all forget. So grab your calendar and make a plan. You'll be working all the time for a while. That's okay. It's not forever. But you've probably been beating your problems with the same hammer for too long—it's time for your brain to rummage around and find a crowbar. Or a bulldozer. Give your mind some time to breathe. Then put away your phone before bed. And maybe do some Yoga.

• P218. It may be an external crisis that you have no control over, or an internal screwup, or just the kinds of growing pains that hit every company. Either way, when the time comes, here's the basic playbook:

  • Keep your focus on how to fix the problem, not who to blame. That will come later and is far too distracting early on.

  • As a leader, you'll have to get into the weeds. Don't be worried about micromanagement—as the crisis unfolds, your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it. However, very quickly after everyone has calmed down and gotten to work, let them do their jobs without you breathing down their necks.

  • Get advice from mentors, investors, your board, or anyone else you know who's gone through something similar. Don't try to solve your problems alone.

  • Your job, once people get over the initial shock, will be constant communication. You need to talk-talk-talk (with your team, the rest of the company, the board, investors, and potentially press and customers) and listen-listen-listen (hear what your team is worried about and the issues that are bubbling up, calm down panicked employees and stressed-out PR people). Don't worry about over-communicating.

  • It doesn't matter if the crisis was caused by your mistake, your team, or a fluke accident: accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize.

• P221. If you're the leader of a broader group or company, you probably spent years of your life unlearning the tendencies of micromanagement. Well, if you're in a crisis, then it's time to be a micro manager again. You'll need to dig into the details—all the details. But you can't make every decision on your own or fix everything single-handedly. You have experts, so you'll need to delegate to them. Agree on the micro-steps that need to be taken, but allow them to take those steps without you. Schedule check-ins in the morning and at the end of the day, and instead of getting the usual weekly or biweekly reports from your team, start going to their daily meetings. You have to be in there, listening, asking questions, and getting necessary information in real time. You might have to be the conduit of that information to the rest of the company, to investors, reporters, or whoever else is watching this situation like a hawk. You need to be able to answer their questions. You need to keep up their confidence that you're getting somewhere. Clear your calendar of nonessential meetings. Focus entirely on fixing the problem. And don't let yourself get knocked off balance—you're human. Don't make things worse by losing your mind and ignoring the things you need to keep your head on straight. That might be exercising, resting, having dinner with your family, or lying on the floor under your desk for ten minutes quietly singing show tunes. Whatever you need. And remember, your team is human, too—people need to go home. They need to sleep. They need to eat. And they need to feel like things are getting better. So keep their focus on your solution, not who's to blame for getting you into this mess in the first place. Everyone will be going through the hypotheticals—what if it was this team's fault? Were they cutting corners? Gossip will be flying, along with accusations. But getting to the bottom of the screwup is not your team's job. It's not even your job. Not in the beginning. You'll get there eventually, but you need to dig yourself out of your hole first. You need to solve for what went wrong and what you're going to do about it, then circle back for the why. Don't forget that even when everyone calms down after the initial shock wears off and gets back to work, they're probably still freaking out internally, just like you. Especially if the task to find a way out of this disaster now rests on their shoulders. Make sure people who are struggling have an open line to talk to you or their manager. Command and control doesn't mean decree and ignore. You're landing a dozen jets on an aircraft carrier at the same time—while giving press briefings and occasional therapy sessions. You will be incredibly worried, but you can't tear your hair out—I strongly recommend being bald already. 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."

• P249. So focus people's attention on the opportunity: help them get curious about what their job could become, instead of being fearful of what they might lose. Do they want to be a manager? A team lead? Do they want to learn more about some other area of the business or dig deeper into something they really enjoy? What do they want to learn? The first steps are to help them understand what they truly love about their jobs, the company, and the culture. Then they can work with their managers to retain things and unload the stuff they don't actually like. Or they can use this moment to start something completely new. Just keep reminding everyone that this is their opportunity to choose their path. They're in charge of their career. Tell them: project yourself into the future and figure out who you want to become and what you want to do.

• P288. Specs and messaging aren't instructions that are set in stone. They flex and change, shifting as new ideas are introduced, or new realities slap you in the face. Building a product isn't like assembling an IKEA chair. You can't just hand people instructions and walk away. Building a product is like making a song. The band is composed of marketing, sales, engineering, support, manufacturing, PR, and legal. And the product manager is the producer—making sure everyone knows the melody, that nobody is out of tune, and everyone knows 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, when features get out of whack, or people get so caught up in their own project that they forget the big picture. But they're also not directing everything. Their job isn't to be CEO of the product—or, God forbid, what some companies call the "product owner." They can't single-handedly dictate what will and will not make it in. Sometimes they'll have the final opinion, sometimes they'll have to say "no," sometimes they'll have to direct from the front. But that should be rare. Mostly, they empower the team. They help everyone understand the context of what the customer needs, then work together to make the right choices.

• P325. So I listened closely, gave them my full attention (don't be checking your phone or computer), and helped them move past their roadblocks. That's often all it takes. 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. I love asking dumb, obvious questions or questions from the customer's perspective—usually three or four "Why is that ... ?" "Why did that ... ?" questions will get to the root of what you're trying to understand, then you can dig further. And if that's not enough, then call in the experts. Bring in experienced people from your team (or sometimes from outside it) who can confirm your inklings or steer you in the right direction until you learn enough ot trust your gut.