Tony Fadell > Quotes

“Traditional schooling trains people to think incorrectly about failure. You’re taught a subject, you take a test, and if you fail, that’s it. You’re done. But once you’re out of school, there is no book, no test, no grade. And if you fail, you learn. In fact, in most cases, it’s the only way to learn—especially if you’re creating something the world has never seen before.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The most wonderful part of building something together with a team is that you’re walking side by side with other people. You’re all looking at your feet and scanning the horizon at the same time. Some people will see things you can’t, and you’ll see things that are invisible to everyone else. So don’t think doing the work just means locking yourself in a room—a huge part of it is walking with your team. The work is reaching your destination together. Or finding a new destination and bringing your team with you.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Every decision has elements of data and opinion, but they are ultimately driven by one or the other. Sometimes you have to double down on the data; other times you have to look at all the data and then trust your gut. And trusting your gut is incredibly scary. 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.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“In the end, there are two things that matter: products and people. What you build and who you build it with. The things you make—the ideas you chase and the ideas that chase you—will ultimately define your career. And the people you chase them with may define your life.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Mission-driven “assholes”: The people who are crazy passionate—and a little crazy. They speak most frankly, trampling the politics of the modern office, and steamroll right over the delicate social order of “how things are done around here.” Much like true assholes, they are neither easygoing nor easy to work with. Unlike true assholes, they care. They give a damn. They listen. They work incredibly hard and push their team to be better—often against their will. They are unrelenting when they know they’re right, but are open to changing their minds and will praise other people’s efforts if they’re genuinely great. A good way to know if you’re working with a mission-driven "asshole" is to listen to the mythos around them—there are always a few choice stories floating around about some crazy thing they’ve done, and the people who’ve worked with them closely are always telling everyone that they’re not that bad, really. Most tellingly, the team ultimately trusts them, respects what they do, and looks back at the experience of working with them fondly, because they pushed the team to do the best work of their lives.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“People won’t remember how you started. They’ll remember how you left.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Try to understand what their roadblocks are and what they’re excited about.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“sometimes the people you don’t expect to be amazing—the ones you thought were Bs and B+s—turn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. They’re modest and kind and just quietly do good work. They’re a different type of “rock star.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The best marketing is just telling the truth.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The danger with traditional commission-based sales models is that they create two different cultures: a company culture and a sales culture. The employees in these two cultures are compensated differently, think differently, care about different things.”
― 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

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

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

“Si no resuelves un problema real, no puedes iniciar una revolución.”
― Tony Fadell, Crea: Una guía poco ortodoxa para hacer cosas que marquen la diferencia

“You will encounter a crisis eventually. Everyone does. If you don’t, you’re not doing anything important or pushing boundaries.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Sundar Pichai told me that all the teams we were trying to work with were very busy. They didn’t have extra cycles to dedicate to Nest. And no one at Google could simply dictate to them how to get things done—it was up to the teams to decide how to use their time. As I stared at him, my eyes widened. I saw stars. It was as if I were in a car accident. Time slowed down. All I could think was, Ooooooooohhhhh, shhhhiiiiiiitttttt.”
― 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

“You can’t just hit customers on the head with the “what” before you tell them the “why.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Tu producto no es solo tu producto. Es toda la experiencia del usuario, una cadena que empieza cuando alguien oye hablar de tu marca por primera vez y termina cuando tu producto desaparece de su vida, devuelto o tirado, vendido a un amigo o borrado por una explosión de electrones. El cliente no diferencia entre la publicidad, la aplicación y la atención al cliente. Todo forma parte de tu empresa. De tu marca.”
― Tony Fadell, Crea: Una guía poco ortodoxa para hacer cosas que marquen la diferencia

“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, when features get out of whack or people get so caught up in their own project that they forget the big picture.”
― 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

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

“Today it’s called finding product/market fit.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And the rules for every successful human relationship are the same: before you can jump headfirst into a major life-changing commitment, you need to get to know each other. Trust each other. Understand each other.”
― 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. 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”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“this isn’t a democracy, that this is an opinion-driven decision and you’re not going to reach the right choice by consensus.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“no matter how much data you get, it will always be inconclusive. This leads to analysis paralysis—death by overthinking.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making