Three takeaways from "Build" by Tony Fadell
What to build and how to build it, from the creator of the iPod
I’ve been reading exclusively on my Kindle for the last few months. It has a feature where you can highlight passages and collate them into a “Clippings” list. I didn’t care much for it — until I read Build. Quotable moments come fast and furious.
Tony Fadell led the design and development of the iPod and iPhone under Steve Jobs. He later founded Nest, modernizing thermostats before tackling smoke detectors, doorbells, and home security systems. Google acquired Nest in 2014 and Fadell stayed on for a few (messy) years.
My bookshelf is replete with books about Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship. From where I’m sitting at my desk I can see Zero to One, The Hard Thing about Hard Things, and The Lean Startup. But Build stands out for its depth of insight while staying accessible. The narrative flow of Fadell’s career journey makes for an engaging read, even if it could be seen as a career advice book at its core.
Woven through Fadell’s experience at Apple are fresh glimpses into the world of Steve Jobs, revealing flashes of the mystery and magnetism that made Apple such a singular force.
Here are three key takeaways that I hope will stay with me.
Takeaway #1 — Avoid wasting time on what nobody cares about
Fadell’s first job, General Magic, was once dubbed “the greatest dead company in Silicon Valley” by Forbes. Founded in 1989, it already embodied familiar Silicon Valley quirks: flat organizational hierarchy, nonexistent dress code, and immense talent. The company bet on superstar engineers, assuming talent alone would lead to success.
Ultimately they lacked a clear vision. Fadell worked on a cell phone long before it was commonplace, but the team prioritized features over user needs. The General Magic team was the first to enable anyone to book flights, send faxes, and make calls on the go. But by building a device for everyone, they accidentally built it for no one. They had built a vitamin, not a painkiller.
The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins […] Vitamin pills are good for you, but they’re not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference.
Features like booking flights or sending faxes were (at the time) nice-to-haves, but didn’t solve urgent problems. The best ideas address pain points, delivering immediate, indispensable value.
There’s an esoteric area of research that explores how names may correlate with personality. I wonder if the naming of “General Magic” played some small part in the company’s fate. Certainly there was a lot of magic. Fadell’s exhilaration working at these bleeding-edge problems is apparent throughout the novel. But there was too much general. The lack of focus contributed to repeatedly pushed-back deadlines and no clear product vision.
It’s not enough to have great engineering talent. People don’t buy features. They buy experiences. Not experiences in the traditional sense, like a concert ticket or hockey game, but a seamless interaction that satisfies a craving or solves a problem.
Often this means aligning engineering priorities with an effortless customer journey instead of showcasing technical prowess. Like a play’s production team, complexity should support the performance — critical but invisible when done well.
Takeaway #2 — Be relentlessly curious about your customer and their journey
The customer journey encompasses far more than meets the eye. It begins when the customer recognizes they have a problem and ends long after they’ve finished using the product. Fostering a deep curiosity about the customer journey within your team is the only way to truly build a painkiller. One of Fadell’s interview questions is simply to ask “what are you curious about?”
This book is chock-full of examples of just how well Fadell and his team know their customer. My favourite is the Nest screwdriver. When the first Nest thermostats shipped, the team noticed customers spent most installation time searching for tools. But rather than throwing in some cheap tools Ikea-style, they realized that this tool would likely remain in people’s drawers and toolboxes. This was recognized as a marketing opportunity. By making it just a bit more functional and appealing, maybe the Nest screwdriver would stand out from other post-installation junk.
People loved it. Long after assembly, users were periodically reminded of the Nest brand. It became an enduring customer touchpoint. The Nest subreddit is still active with gratitude for that simple screwdriver.
Fadell and his teams found value in unconventional and forgotten domains. I especially liked this passage about how the Nest screwdriver clashed with traditional accounting and finance metrics:
They didn’t understand that it wasn’t a straight COGS line item. It was a marketing expense. And a support expense. […] Instead of angry calls, we had happy customers raving online about their great experience.
Another example is how the Nest baby camera team handled the California warning label for corded devices used near children. The Nest team prided themselves on making beautiful products. But a massive warning label with a diagram of a baby with a cord around its neck negates some of the design effort. So the Nest team made it bigger, knowing that people usually rip these labels off anyway, and enlarging it would only increase that probability. It transformed a regulatory headache into a brand-affirming moment.
At one point in this book, Fadell shines his spotlight of customer comprehension on the reader with his “why I want it vs why I need it” framework. This was a tool used across many of his design efforts, and here he shares his customer characterization for Build.
Reading this felt… personal. I certainly check more than one box. It’s as if Fadell was saying, “yup, I see you, and I understand what you’re thinking.” Remarkably emphatic, given we’ve never met. In the chapter about product managers, he actually lists empathy as the top trait.
His superpower — the superpower of every truly great product manager — is empathy.
Maybe that’s why I enjoyed this book so much. At the same time, this might also explain why others might not. And that’s fine. You never want to build something for everyone (see takeaway #1).
Takeaway #3 — Apply care and attention at every step
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author Robert Pirsig talks a lot about gumption. It’s tough to ascribe a definition, but the “flow state” is a good approximation. Being fully attentive to what you’re doing. Pirsig exemplifies gumption by describing his process of tuning his motorcycle, using all his senses and awareness in this simple mechanical task.
Gumption is not always explicit in Build, and Fadell never once uses that strange word, but it’s evident in his career. Fadell’s attentiveness permeates every paragraph. He deeply cares — about his customers, his staff, his product. Even if you’ve never read Build or heard of Tony Fadell, if you were around for the first iPods and iPhones, you know just how meticulous the team is, and how much care they put into every little detail.
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.
Fadell indirectly highlights gumption as a top strategy for getting a job. It’s how he landed his role at General Magic over more qualified engineers — by being genuinely curious, persistent, and bringing fresh ideas to the table. Offering an insight or unique perspective, even if it’s not perfect, sets you apart from the crowd, who are often focused solely on being persuasive. This, to me, embodies gumption because it shows attentiveness to a company’s systems and challenges. That care and curiosity often signal a strong potential hire. When a company builds a team of individuals with this mindset and channels it into the customer journey, you get groundbreaking successes like Apple and Nest.
When a company gives that kind of care and attention to every part of the journey, people notice.
Attentiveness on a company level leads to a deeper understanding of what needs to be done beyond a list of features to implement. It’s more about creating a customer experience stemming from more abstract desires, like in the customer framework in takeaway #2. In Zen, Pirsig describes his vision of motorcycle maintenance in a romantic way, contrasting with a friend “John” who only sees the motorcycle as a collection of parts.
John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.
General Magic saw the cell phone as a collection of parts and features. Fadell learned his lesson and realized the importance of working on concepts with Apple and Nest. As a result, he helped create products that defined entire categories.
Final thoughts
Reading Build reminded me that great products aren’t just engineered. They’re empathized into existence. Fadell’s career offers lessons not only for aspiring entrepreneurs but for anyone striving to create something meaningful.