Build — A Top of the Page Review
August 2023
I’ve spent much of my career building products:
- Software
- Services
- Curriculum
Product development is hard. It is stressful, overwhelming, and uncertain…and it is thrilling, fulfilling, and magical.
Fadell, Tony. 2022. Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. New York: Harper Business
Quick Summary
On its surface, this book is about building consumer products. (And the advice on product development is completely on point!)
But at its heart, it’s really about building businesses. In that regard, the key argument is that businesses are built around dedicated, driven people who care about the products they make because business leaders care about the people making the products that are building the business.
People, product, and business are all interrelated elements of the same thing: doing work that matters to people.
Key Takeaways
Leadership
What I liked most about this book is its centrality on people. A book about building products might be forgiven for dwelling on tactics or systems, but the author neatly sidesteps this pitfall to focus on the one thing that matters most when building anything — people. It doesn’t really matter what the product is, every product needs leadership that focuses first and foremost on people.
➡️ The people for whom you are building.
➡️ The people with whom you are building.
Products are secondary to people. Always. Good leaders never forget that.
A well known facet of leadership is looking down the road and around the corners. But the author argues that effort is more than scanning the horizon for threats and opportunities. The crux of it is seeing where your people are on that road and what awaits them along the way. True leadership is understanding current and future needs and finding a way to meet both now. A leader’s priority is meeting people where they are and helping them prepare for the changes that are coming.
To this strategy, storytelling is a powerful, but underrated, component. Some of the most powerful stories a leader tells are the ones about how and why decisions are made. Leaders have a responsibility to explain decisions in a way that makes sense to and honors the audience. Perhaps more importantly, leaders who embrace storytelling to explain decisions habitually surface their own knowledge gaps and untested assumptions. These stories create cultures of clarity, transparency, and adaptability.
Product (and Business) Development
Of the many, many great and practical tips offered in this book, the author’s recommendation to wrap a solution around the customer is the best.
There is a popular saying in product design: marry the problem, not the solution. My time in the technology sector has made it painfully clear that too many businesses are built around solutions looking for a problem to solve. Their founders built something because they could, not because they understood who needed it and why. These products never grain traction and waste untold capital, talent, and opportunities. Good products start with a deep empathy for real people and their real needs.
Wrapping a product around a customer means designing not only the product, but everything in the customer’s journey to, with, and away from the product. (I’ve written about the customer’s journey away from the product here: The Good Goodbye.) Build recommends mapping out the desired customer experience with marketing, purchasing, installing, and using the product before working on the product at all. It’s solid advice.
Process Design
Two of the ideas introduced in this book are worth calling out for their value in developing internal business processes. In the book, these ideas are applied to product development, but they could easily apply to many other aspects of business: leadership, organizational development, etc. Let’s look at them vis a vis process design/improvement.
Failure
Want better processes? Be willing to test out some terrible ones along the way.
The author is blunt in his prediction of failure for anybody trying to build something new. Whether it’s a product, or a business, or a new process, failure will happen at some point, in some way.
Failure is inherent in trying anything new. Anything that creates disruption will fail many times. But failing is not the problem. Failing to learn is the problem. Each failure should happen quickly enough that a valuable lesson can be gleaned and applied.
Failure should be expected. Nothing kills innovation faster than aversion to failure.
Disruption
Disruption must serve a purpose. That purpose must be improvement for the people you are serving. What and how you are disrupting a thing has to make sense to the end user.
Disruption for its own sake is useless. And, in my opinion, immature. I have seen too many executives undermine their teams and undercut performance by hewing to a philosophy of disruption for disruption’s sake. So before making any process change, scrutinize the value those changes will deliver to the people you serve.
Memorable Quotes
1️⃣
“People first. Always. What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.”
2️⃣
“That ‘why’ is the most critical part of product development — it has to come first. Once you have a strong answer for why your product is needed, then you can focus on how it works.”
3️⃣
“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. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)”
Final Thoughts
There is much that I like about this book. I like the author’s transparency about the difficulty, purpose, and meaning of creating products. I like the way that it avoids hustle culture with its glorification of unsustainable people practices. I like the applicability of its advice for people doing hard things in businesses, big and small. I like the honesty and transparency of the emotional weight of leadership, failure, and innovation.
But mostly I like the theme of humanity that runs through the book.
- Products for people.
- Businesses for people.
- People for people.
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Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?
