Build

Six parts moving outward: building yourself, building a career, building a product, building a business, building a team, and being a CEO. The chapters are short and largely independent.

Fadell's framing is that this is the mentorship he received and would otherwise not pass on, which sets the register: specific, opinionated, and occasionally blunt about people he worked with.

It is written as mentorship rather than as theory, which is why it is specific rather than general.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The chapter on the first version of a product — that it will be bad, that shipping it is still correct, and that the second version is where the business is — is the one most worth having.

His account of storytelling as a product discipline, and of why the pitch should be written before the product, is the other. The Nest thermostat chapter shows it applied concretely.

This is a survivor's account from inside two of the most successful hardware programmes in history, and the advice carries the assumptions of that context — capital, talent and a market that existed.

Fadell is also candid about being difficult to work for, which makes the management chapters more informative than the usual leadership advice but does not make them a template.

The context is exceptional; the advice is specific to it and does not say so often enough.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Fadell structures the book as a set of answers to questions he has actually been asked, organised by career stage — individual contributor, manager, leader, founder, chief executive — rather than as the story of his career. Readers can enter at their own stage, which is how he intends it to be used.

His advice for early career is to optimise for what you will learn and for who you will learn it from rather than for title or salary, and to choose a company whose product you would use. It is conventional advice made specific: he is clear about what a good manager looks like and what to do when you do not have one.

The product chapters argue for solving a problem you personally have, for identifying the painkiller rather than the vitamin, and for the discipline of being able to state why anyone should care in a sentence. His account of the iPod and the Nest thermostat is used to show the reasoning rather than to celebrate the outcome.

If you cannot say in one sentence why anybody should care, there is nothing to build yet.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

One of the better chapters treats the explanation of a product as part of the product: the analogy that makes it comprehensible, the reason a customer should switch, and the fact that a thing nobody can describe will not sell regardless of how well it works.

He is direct about the two kinds of decision — those made from data and those made from judgement when the data is absent — and about the failure mode of demanding evidence for the second kind. The chapters on hard conversations and on firing people are unusually concrete for the genre.

A good deal of the advice is drawn from hardware companies with enormous capital requirements and long development cycles, and Fadell's experience at Apple under a specific and unusual leadership culture. Readers in software, services or small businesses should expect to translate rather than apply.

It is written after two conspicuous successes and a sale to Google, and it does not seriously examine the role of timing, capital access or luck. The chapter on Nest's later difficulties inside Google is the most candid section and the closest the book comes to accounting for something going wrong.