Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Tony Fadell draws on his experience helping create the iPod, iPhone, and Nest thermostat to explain how consequential products are conceived, built, improved, and brought to market. Unlike books that present innovation as a neat methodology, Build conveys the untidy reality of product development: incomplete information, conflicting priorities, difficult personnel decisions, organizational politics, design compromises, and the constant tension between vision and execution. For VMT mentors, the book is particularly useful because Fadell combines product judgment with operational experience. It can help mentors challenge founders who are too focused on technology, too removed from the customer, or too willing to accept a merely adequate product. The book is opinionated, and Fadell's management style will not fit every founder or culture, but that makes it especially valuable as a source of discussion rather than a rigid playbook.

Readers will learn how to recognize meaningful customer problems, move from an idea to a product, develop product judgment, recruit and manage teams, build organizational processes, work with investors and boards, and make difficult decisions as a company grows. Mentors will gain useful questions for examining whether a founder is building something genuinely valuable or merely something technically possible.