Tony Fadell: Build
When choosing career, the correct place to start is: “what do I want to learn?”
Follow your natural interests, not- “What company has enough name recognition that my mom can brutally crush the other moms when they boast about their kids?” 😂
If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution.
Interesting: Steve Jobs once said of management consulting, "You do get a broad cut at companies but it's very thin. It's like a picture of a banana: you might get a very accurate picture but it's only two dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes but you never really taste it "
To differentiate yourself - I can’t make you the best or the brightest, but I can make you the most knowledgeable. You can collect more information than anyone else”
Find the experts on twitter or YouTube, then send them a message, a comment, a linkedin connection. You’re interested in the same things and have the same passions, so share your point of view, ask a smart question, or tell them some small fact you’ve learned.
The key is persistence and being helpful. I notice when someone sends me something cool last week and something cool this week and they keep bringing fascinating news or ideas. I might respond and turn it into an intro or a friendship.
As an IC you complete tasks that need to be done in a week or two. You look down.
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.
Wow, great advice:
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 designers, 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.
Talk to marketing and support since they’re closest to the customer.
How Tony became CTO at Phillips:
A) pitched an idea to his mangers at general magic, but they didn’t have the bandwidth to make a new product
B) reached out to investors and big corporate partners (one was phillips)
Just like the specter of management. How do you manage a team when you've never managed before? How do you make decisions when everyone's split on what to do? How do you set a process to make forward progress toward a unified goal? How do you know if you're headed in the right direction? Or if you should quit?
The sooner you realize these questions exist, the better. Everyone rising in their career has to face them at some point.
Once you're a manager you’re no longer the job you previously loved and got promoted for. If you’re doing what you loved in your old job, you’re doing it wrong.
You now lead a team of people doing what you used to be good at.
85%+ of your time should be spent managing.
One part of being a manager is letting go and being hands off. Give your team room to be creative with opportunities to shine. You can’t give too much space that you’re surprised by what the product becomes. Care deeply about the quality, not the process. Define the process, then let the team work.
Good to say in 1:1s “I’m still learning. Please tell me what I can do to make things better”
As a manager, you have to find what connects with your team. How can you share your passion with them, motivate them?
Communication. You have to tell the team why. Why am I this passionate? Why is this mission meaningful? Why is this detail so important I’m flipping out right now when nobody else seems to think it matters?
Tell them why.
And sometimes supplement with what. What am I getting paid, what will I get if I succeed?
If you’re a manager you’re now a parent. You should want your kids to be more successful than you. Help them through failure and find success.
Glow with pride when they kick ass at a board meeting or present their work to the entire company. That’s how you start to love the job.
Hm. Might help one day.
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.
So tell the team your thought process. Walk through all the data you looked at, all the insights you gathered, and why you ultimately made this choice. Take people's input. Listen, don't react. There may be a minority of team members who agree with the decision; there might be some good feedback that makes you modify your plan. If not, give the speech: 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.
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.
That's what's always worked for me. It's how my team at Philips came to accept my decisions.
Product
Make the intangible tangible
Spend effort by how much it solves a customer problem and how much tine the customer spends on that part of their journey. E.g., for Nest: 10% on website, 10% on installation, 10% on looking/touching device, 70% on the phone controlling the thermostat
Make each step physical (even if it’s not). Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Write up the reactions you’d want to get from the early adopters. Write up the headlines you want to see from reviewers. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch.
That’s how you hack your brain. That’s how you hack the brain of everyone on your team.
them?
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 tech-nology.
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 much money they spent on heating bills in the winter.
We needed to look through their eyes to understand why the might pick up the box. And so we could convince the woman 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.
Reduce friction bumps between each CJ step. At each bump the consumer asks “why should I care?” Why should I buy it, why should I use it? Why should I stick with it?
When we had prototypes of the actual thermostat, we sent it out to real people to test. We knew self-installation was potentially a huge stumbling block, so everyone waited with bated breath to see how it went. Did people shock themselves? Start a fire? Abandon the project halfway through because it was too complicated?
Soon our testers reported in: It went fine. Everything's up and running! But it took about an hour to install.
We winced. Crap. An hour was way too long. Beth from Pennsylvania would not be cool with turning off the power, opening up the wall, and fiddling with unknown wires for an hour. This needed to be an easy DIY project, a quick upgrade.
So we dug into the reports what was taking so long? What were we missing?
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.
A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a feature and then describe the feature to others.
Ex. 1,000 songs in your pocket
In business, it takes six to ten years for an overnight success. It always takes longer than you think to find product/market fit, to get your customers' attention, to build a complete solution, and then to make money. You typically need to create at least three generations of any new, disruptive product before you get it right and turn a profit. This is true for B2B and B2C, for companies that build with atoms or electrons or both, for brand-new startups and brand-new products.
3 parts to success:
Context to how Tony started Nest with his former intern - interesting to replicate:
After I left Apple, Matt started getting frustrated with how things were going. So we had lunch and he asked what I was going to do next. I told him the idea. He was enthusiastic. And when I say enthusiastic, you should know that Matt is a perpetual motion machine of unstoppable energy. He immediately started digging in, offering suggestions and ideas, growing more and more excited the longer we talked. That push was what I needed to commit. He was a real partner who could share the load, who'd work just as hard as me and care just as much.
Startup idea
First, painkiller.
Second, for a recurring irritation your can’t get rid of.
Third, the “why” has to be crisp and easy to articulate.
Now you have a good germ. You can’t build a company on a germ of an idea. If it passes these filters, you are looking good:
The only way to know is to see if it will chase you. And the chasing
process is always the same:
. First, you're dumbstruck by how great an idea this is. How has nobody thought of this before?
. Then you start looking into it. And oh, okay they have thought ofit. They tried it and failed. Or maybe you really have stumbled into something nobody has ever done before. And the reason is this insane, impossible obstacle that there's no way to get around.
You begin to understand how hard it would be to do this-there's so much you don't know. So you put it aside.
. But you can't get it out of your head. So you research it here and there. You start sketching or coding or writing, making little prototypes of what this thing could be. Napkin drawings constantly fall out of your bag. Your notebook is full of feature ideas, sales ideas, marketing ideas, business model ideas. You think that maybe the people who tried this idea before were taking the wrong approach. Or maybe an obstacle that was stopping others can now be solved with a new technology maybe the moment for this idea has finally come.
• That's when it starts to get more real for you. So you decide to commit to really looking into it, to digging deep to make an informed decision. You need to figure out whether you should pursue this idea or not.
' One day you realize there's a way around that one impossible obstacle. You're thrilled! Until you see the next huge roadblock in your way. Crap. I'll never work. But you keep digging and trying things and getting advice from experts and friends and you realize, actually, maybe there's a way around that, too.
'People start asking you about your project- when are you going to launch? Can I join? Are you taking angel investment? Each obstacle turns into an opportunity, each problem pushes you to find a new solution, and opportunity, and each solution gets you more excited about the idea.
Idea generation 2
Avoid habituation: Everyone gets used to things. Life is full of tiny and enormous inconveniences that you no longer notice because your brain has simply accepted them as unchangeable reality and filtered them out.
For example, think about the little sticker that grocery stores put on produce. Instead of just eating an apple, you now have to find the sticker, peel it off, and scrape the gluey residue off with a fingernail.
The first few times you encountered the sticker, you were probably annoyed. By now you barely register it.
But when you think like a designer, you stay awake to the many things in your work and life that can be better. You find opportunities to improve experiences that people long ago assumed would just always be terrible.'
Interesting
From Bill Campbell
When he saw I was about to take a wrong turn, he’d put his finger in his mouth, make a popping noise, and say, “You know what that is? That’s the sound of you pulling your head out of your ass.”
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.
Taking on VC is marrying for money.
There is a power balance too. A VC can fire a founder, a founder can’t fire their VC. You cannot divorce them for irreconcilable differences.
When things go south, you can end up in an estranged marriage. You’re still together but the VC won’t talk to you or connect you or help you.
To be able to relax / not think about something all the time, you need to get it of your head.
Tony would have notes with the main goals for every function of the business, and a section on the side for productivity improvements for each section (ideas from employees in meetings)
What to include in each marketing material, rough guide
CEO and leadership
I remember going to the Aston Martin factory once to have a meeting with the CEO. It was 9 a.m. and pouring as we drove through the lot. At one point we had to stop the car as a guy covered in bright yellow raingear and galoshes hurried across our path. When we got to the meeting, in comes the guy in the galoshes. It was the CEO.
Andy Palmer had been walking the lot, personally inspecting each car that came off the line.
The CEO sets the tone for the company every team looks to the CEO and the exec team to see what's most critical, what they need to pay attention to. So Andy showed them. He stepped into the rain and looked at the engines, the upholstery, the dashboards, the exhaust pipes, everything. He rejected any car that wasn't perfect.
If a leader gets distracted from the customer if business goals and spreadsheets full of numbers for shareholders become a higher priority than customer goals the whole organization can easily for get what's most important.
If you want to build a great company, expect excellence from every part of it. The output of every team can make or break the customer experience, so they should all be a priority.
You bring me something that’s 90% good. You work tirelessly for weeks, you’ve thought through and are proud of your work. And I will have to tell you to make it better. It will take 2 more weeks to get to 95%. And that’s only halfway to perfect.
Push your team to discover how great they can be.
As leader, your job is to care. Your focus, your passion trickles down. If you don’t give a shit about marketing, you’ll get shitty marketing. If you don’t care about design, you’ll get designers who don’t care either.
I met with every team at least twice a year. Even if you were building internal software tools, eventually you’d be called in to show your strategy.
I’d watch the presentation and dig in—do we have the right back end IT to do this? How are you planning to get around this issue? How can other people on the other team help? How can I help? Any other teams I can intro you to?