# iPhone Creator, Tony Fadell on Marketing Lessons Learned from Steve Jobs, What is Truly Great Product Marketing, How The Best Product Teams Do Post-Mortems and Product Reviews & Is Product Art or Science, Data or Gut? 20Product · May 11, 2022 · 54 min · 11,703 words Speakers: Harry Stebbings, Tony Fadell Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-06a8e3ef/ ## Cold open **Harry Stebbings** [0:00]: So I have to be honest. I think there are a few podcast episodes that really stand the test of time. However, I have no doubt that this 20 product ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:07]: is one of them with a friend and industry OG in the one and only Tony Fadell. Tony, often referred to as the father of the iPod, is one of the leading product thinkers of the last thirty years as one of the makers of some of the most game changing products in society. From the iPhone and iPod to more recently founding Nest, creating the Nest Thermostat, leading to their $3,200,000,000 acquisition by Google. This episode is a masterclass. Get your pen and paper ready, bring your product teams, and buckle up. And most importantly, Tony has released the most incredible book, Build. I have to admit, I don't often read things that are longer than a tweet, but this was an absolute favorite of mine. It made doing this show such a joy and you have to check it out. A huge thank you to Scott Balsky. Some amazing questions today. Scott, as always, I so appreciate your input. But before we dive into the show's ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [0:53]: day, in the ever changing landscape of work, how can you ensure your people, workflows and data stay connected? Well, this is how. Airtable allows you to create flexible systems that help your team operate as one, break down the barriers that leave teams feeling disconnected. With Airtable, your team works from a single source of truth that is always up to date. 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Make data driven product decisions that result in higher revenue and user adoption. Your product teams will be empowered to create delightful customer experiences. Visit productboard.com/teams to learn more. But that is quite enough from me. So now I'm so excited to hand over to the one and only, a dear friend and OG of this industry, Fadell. Three, two, one, zero. **Unknown** [2:29]: You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [2:32]: Tony, this is such a joy to do. You know I always love our chats. As we said, like, the schedule's here, and we're not gonna use it at all. But thank you for joining me first. **Unknown** [2:41]: Thank you, Harry. Thanks for having me on again. It's always fun to talk with you and chat. So let's see what happens today. **Harry Stebbings** [2:46]: Listen, this will be great. I wanna start with a little bit of context. We always have to start with a bit of storytelling. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups? How did Apple come to be? How did Nest come to be? I mean, summarize your life in two to three minutes. It's a very simple question. Summarize **Tony Fadell** [2:59]: my life? Let's see. I've been a geek since birth. Oh, not birth. Well, almost birth. Geek with analog tools and hammers and nails and all that stuff for, like, two or three, and then wound up having a tool called a computer when I was about 10 years old, something like that, and fell in love with writing my first programs. And when I say write, I mean write with number two pencil on a bubble card, writing code via pencil marks on a card that you'd set into mini computer, a mainframe. It would print out on a paper terminal. So no graphics. It was all text. There was no disks even. There was no cloud. There was nothing. So that's where I got hooked. And then I just followed that journey from writing software to making hardware and software and just continuing along. And after trying startups and stuff like that, followed my heroes out to to Silicon Valley at a company called General Magic, who was the Mac team creating the iPhone just fifteen years before the iPhone came out. We were doing it too early. It was a crazy ambitious project. So many very smart people. Fast forward over almost thirty years there, and out came the iPod and the iPhone and Nest and its line of products. In a nutshell, been a geek, always been a geek, continue to be a geek, and had just a lot of fun along the way and a lot of failure and a lot of learnings. And that's what Build in our book is all about, is Build's all about all not just the successes, but mostly about all the failures. **Harry Stebbings** [4:21]: The only great thing now is Geek is Chic. I do wanna ask that you mentioned some of the incredible products that you've worked on. The thing that always strikes me when it comes to product is fundamentally whether it's art or whether it's science, whether it's data or whether it's gut. When you think about this question, actually, a great answer to this one, so no pressure on me. He always does. But how would you describe products being science or art? Data or **Tony Fadell** [4:43]: It's both. In fact, in the book, there's a chapter called data versus opinion. And really, what it's about is when are certain decisions opinion based decisions? You'll never get the data to be able to make a decision, and you need an opinion just to follow through. Or is this a really a data driven decision? Something where you can collect enough data to then choose the right thing. A great product of version one point o is an overlap of some insights, not necessarily data because it more or less, that product probably didn't exist before. And then there's a lot of opinion on what we should do. And those things overlap, and that should be an incredible way of understanding what you're trying to do. There is no such thing as only art and only science. It is about art and science and storytelling that really pull it off to make a great product happen, whether that's a consumer product, an all Adam's product, a bits product, a bits plus Adam's product, or a business product. It's all about art, science, and the way you, storyteller, communicate what it is. **Harry Stebbings** [5:40]: Can I ask, do you think for you and also for, like, much more seasoned incredible product leaders, the gut and opinion increases over time and data decreases with increasing confidence that you know what you're doing? **Tony Fadell** [5:53]: No. I wouldn't say that. I think as you go through successive versions, you get better and better data from people who are actually paying for whatever it is you're doing, getting revenue in some form. So those people have real opinions because they're using it and they're paying you for it. It's not like they're just getting it free and going, oh, yeah. I like a free service. Who doesn't like a free service? Right? One thing is to really understand you're gonna have a lot of data driven arguments about refining the product, doing new things. But then at the same time, you're gonna have new ways of where to take that product or add new products to it. And you really need to you're gonna go back to that opinion based thing. So you're gonna go back and forth the entire time. And if you only take opinion moving forward, forget it. A lot of times, your opinion was wrong when you had a failure. So go understand what was wrong there. Was it your opinion? Was it something you didn't get right about the target customer or their needs or something like that? But later on, you can't just trust opinion. You have data, you have customers doing it, so talk to them. But anybody who's got the hubris to think their opinion always makes the most sense and that is the way it's gonna be, that's absolutely wrong. It's a good way to get started, but it's not the way to actually win a market, not a way to really be successful. **Harry Stebbings** [7:01]: Oh, Tony, I've missed you. I've missed our conversations. Tell me, we've got data and we've got opinion there. Can you take me to a time that stands out for you? You mentioned obviously the book being centered and discussing quite a lot of some failures and some challenges that you face. If you think about data and then opinion and the two opposing, can you take me to a failure that you've had in the past where you lent on one or the other? **Tony Fadell** [7:23]: Well, here's one. My opinion so this was back in at Philips. So Philips, we're making mobile handheld communicator products, precursors to kind of the handhelds we have today, but they were like Palm Pilots, these kinds of things. All the data told me, all the data so we already shipped the first product, and people were saying, need to go to color screens. The first product was grayscale screen. And all the data told me, don't go to a color screen. It's gonna wreck your battery life. It's gonna do all of these things. It's gonna make the device bigger, more expensive, heavier. The battery life's gonna be horrible. Like, there's so many downside with going to color. Don't go to color. Stay black and white. What happened was we did all that, and the market took off with color screens. Why? Because the emotion of color was so strong over the data that said, no. Black and white is better for all of these usability reasons was not enough. So you sometimes even though you might have the right data, you have to really understand your customers' opinions and understand what their emotional needs are, not just their practical needs are, and put those together. And so, obviously, we got it wrong. We put a the black and white or grayscale screen out, got it wrong, and had to rev it quickly. But those are those kind of transitions in the market where you're like, well, it doesn't make sense from the data perspective, but it does from the emotional perspective. **Harry Stebbings** [8:41]: Well, actually and I'm sorry. Didn't mean to push back on you, and it's easy for me in the benefit of hindsight. That's one type of data being the bomb cost being, the unit cost being, the battery life. But the other data would be customer insights and customer discovery. Did you do that there? Because there, it would seem like that would have guided you in a different direction. **Tony Fadell** [8:58]: Yeah. We absolutely did that. There were laptops with color screens, but there are no little devices with color screens at that point. This was 1997. And so this was when is the right time to make that shift from grayscale to color. Well, again, you can ask customers, do you want that? And they go, of course I want color. But then you say, it comes with all these other things. And they go, I don't know if I want color. At the end of the day, they won't tell you what they really want, which is when they're at the store and they see or that was back then. They see that color display next to the black and white ones, and they go, oh, I'm gonna just buy that. It costs more. It has worse battery life. Whatever. I just want that. It's cooler. You can't always just trust what the customer says because what happens is our framing of it, we're asking the questions. Oh, well, if you bought it, it would be like this, this, this, and this. And then here are the counts. Like, we gave them the review, so to speak. But they don't get that when they're in the store. They just get the, the gut reaction. Right? They go, oh, I want that. Right? So it's not always so easy to know what is customer says, what they say they want versus what they actually do. **Harry Stebbings** [9:59]: When did you have an opinion and you were like, you know what? This is the way I feel it in my gut and I'm going with my intuition here. When did you have that and it went wrong on the flip side? When **Tony Fadell** [10:09]: it went wrong? Well, my gut was telling me to go grayscale. Right? And my gut told me that was the right way to go. **Harry Stebbings** [10:15]: Did you ever go against the data when your gut told you otherwise? **Tony Fadell** [10:18]: Sure. At Nest, there was this argument the whole time when we shipped the very first thermostat. We included a very expensive tool inside the package, and it was screwdriver with changeable bits so that when you got it right out of the box, could you start mounting this thing to your wall, your new product on your wall, taking the old one off, putting this on, and have a little tool set with you to be able to do that. And then you could always have it. It was Nest brand. It was a little tool I should have on here, but I don't. And it says Nest on it. And you could then keep it in your desk drawer, in your kitchen drawer, whatever with your tools, and you'd always have this reminder of Nest. It was a marketing thing as well as an out of boxing. Well, every single time we would have a new rev of the product. Do we have to keep the screwdriver in the box? Do we have to keep the It costs us X, Y, Z amount of money. I'm like, we need it in there. That's our marketing. That is a sign of the brand, a care we take because we custom designed the screwdriver. It wasn't just something we bought and put a brand on it. We literally designed the whole thing. And people fight every single time. It'll reduce the cost for shipping. It will make the box smaller. It will make our margins higher and higher. And I could, no, no, no, no, no. Right? And so that was the opinion of like, the brands matters, guys. These are intangible things that we get through the brand and that people see in the real world that we can't put on on our COGs line. But there are there. We see it. We see people talking about it online and YouTube videos and installation, all that stuff. We're gonna keep doing this. That's another thing of like the data says, absolutely get rid of it. But the opinion was like, no, no, no, no. There's something a higher order bit here that we're gonna miss if we take that of the box. **Harry Stebbings** [11:56]: Can I ask, how do you think about the trade off between product customer experience there versus business rationale and unit economics? **Tony Fadell** [12:04]: Because you're not gonna have a great business if you don't have great customers who love your brand. You gotta work within constraints. But if it means it's going to be, let's say, 10% more expensive because of all these little bells and whistles, that might be the right thing because that's the marketing in the field that happened. Then you go, okay, I'm willing to invest in that because that marketing is gonna carry long beyond when they initially unbox or use the software the first time. They're going to be able to see that marketing over and over and over. Just because your unit economics might not be as attractive from a business perspective, you're making investments in your brand. You're making investments in what you stand as a company. And those are the things that people take away and remember. It may not feel direct, but it really is direct sooner or later when they tell their friends about it. Or when they remember when they saw that tool in their desk and they go, Oh yeah, it's such a great experience with that. Oh, maybe I should reconsider them as a brand for another product that I want to buy. Sometimes it doesn't make logical sense from the financial point of view. But look, if we were going to create new products all based on finance, we would not have the world we have today because people imagined something bigger, something greater, and then took those opinions and turning into something and said, now it is the way it is. And this is the problem that we have with climate. A lot of people are saying, well, I can't replace this material with that material. It costs more. It might be functionally equivalent, but it costs more, but it helps the planet. Yes. So what? It costs me more. Well, have you ever thought about what your customers might want? What they might be turning towards? You gotta have a bigger vision of what the needs are of the individual customer as well as the collective customer and go, wait a second. Maybe this would be better for the planet overall, and I'll get these new customers that wouldn't consider our product because we're doing something smart here for the environment. Yeah. It might be more expensive today for that material, but as soon as that volume hits and we get it it takes off, actually, it's gonna be cheaper than the petroleum based product because it's built with plants, it's easier to make the plants than suck oil out of the ground. So these are those kind of trade offs where people are like, I gotta stay with the status quo because my economics say so versus, oh, I might be losing customers. There might be a better way of doing it. I'm making an investment on a new set of customers that I need to have and to keep my business going well into the future. And by the way, the margins might improve. It might actually be better than it has been. It takes imagination. It takes leaders who really see the bigger picture than just the numbers people in the back always hacking and slashing saying no. No. No. No. No. **Harry Stebbings** [14:32]: Can I ask? I wanna get back to the screwdriver, actually, because it reminds me of my conversation with Scott on the first mile experience. And he said, everyone does the first mile experience. So shit. So shit. And so my question to you is, like, if we think about that screwdriver, that's a moment of delight for the user when they open it up and see that, that you've thought about it. What to you how do you think of what makes a great first mile experience? **Tony Fadell** [14:53]: Every customer touch point. And this is in the book. Customer journey. Right? We talk about making the intangible tangible. That is specifically about what are all the customer touch points along the way. When they first learn about your brand, when they learn about your products, when they learn about other people using the products, reviews, when they go to shop for it, whatever it is, what are the loyalty things once they get out of box experience? What's the loyalty things at the end? Understanding that entire customer journey. You have to look at that whole thing. As Scott said, the first mile, we always talk about the last mile. How do we get into somebody's house? How do we deliver something faster? The last mile delivery, the last mile of Internet connectivity or the last kilometer of Internet. How do we get the fiber directly to the home? How do we get the package directly to that person's hand? We optimize so much of that. And we do, a lot of places, do a great job with it. Why aren't we thinking about, what about once that package is on the doorstep or that software download's happening? What are the next steps after that? To where they have this amazing product experience, if you spend a lot of time on that, why aren't you spending all the other time on the other parts of the experience to make sure to remove the friction? So when they get that out of box or that first installation, that first experience of that product, they go, wow. They didn't go, finally, God, I got through that gut wrenching experience. Each experience and customer touch point should build positively on the last one. And all the way till the first experience of the product should be even better. Right? It should be stellar. So you just have this step up effect in emotion, positive emotion, all the way to the first usage. And you go, holy shit, this is amazing. I love the entire journey. Not I had this great product, but man, it was so hard to buy. It was so hard to this. I didn't understand. It was too complicated. What are you doing? If you don't make a great last mile or first mile experience, depending on how you wanna talk about it, who is? You're inflicting that pain on everyone, everyone who buys your product, and you're trying to say, we love you, customer. We trust you. We want you to have these superpowers we've created for you. Make it easy for them. **Harry Stebbings** [16:51]: You said about that first mile there, that really making it a joy for the consumer. It was actually Dave Marin that said before, the devil's in the default. I'm always stuck on this one, Tony, because I'm like, don't consumers like the default? They know the default. It's comfortable to know what they have done before. Sure. Why is the devil in the default, do you think? And do you agree with him in that respect? **Tony Fadell** [17:12]: Yes. The default is 98% of the time, everybody just wants a simple, easy experience. What happens is is we sit here, especially for reviewers. When I was growing up, it was all about bits and bytes and feeds and speeds and numbers. Even get this a lot from all the gamers with FPS frames per second and how many polygons. You can get into the weeds. That is a set of people who will love that stuff. But what happens is is the marketing departments, they all center around these types of reviews that they think are make or break, that are based on all these numbers. When they forget 97, 98, 99% of people, maybe even more, depending on the product, don't care about all that stuff. They just want it to work. They bought it to solve a pain. They didn't buy it to get more pain. Why did they buy something to get more pain? Why are we giving them more pain in the first mile experience when you think you've solved their pain just beyond the first mile experience? **Harry Stebbings** [18:06]: It just it makes no sense to me. So you said about kind of the reviewers on the kind of consumer side and on the Business **Tony Fadell** [18:12]: side too. **Harry Stebbings** [18:12]: Yes. But I wanna ask about in product teams. How do you think about product reviews within product teams? How do you like to conduct them? What makes a great one great versus average? **Tony Fadell** [18:23]: Great question. And I did one I did a product review this morning. The first thing is making sure everybody's on the same page as who are we designing for. Who is the audience and what kind of experience are we trying to go for? And having analogs of those experiences that we thought were great from other products or other things that we've experienced in our past, which ones were great? And what would we like to draw from those experiences into the one we're trying to create ourselves? So who is the target customer? Understand all the different customer groups, but what is the main main target? What is our goal? Are we trying to grow new users? Are we trying to retain existing users? What have you. And then it's like, what's the percentage of that? And sometimes they'll like, oh, it's a third, a third, a third. I'm like, well, then we're gonna try to please everyone and please no one. So pick one. There's always gotta be a one priority path. If not, you've probably not structured your product right. So you pick that primary path and you optimize everything around it and you bring experiences that you've loved that is similar in a way, in some analog, that you can then project on that to look at it and go, what about this deal? What about that deal? Too many people stay so inward about this step, that step, this step, that step. They don't step back and they go, well, what's a different way of doing it? Where can we remove steps? Where do we actually add one step, but we can remove 10 steps down the line? All of those things need to be considered. In fact, in this morning's design review, there's like two teams in this onboarding. There's one team that's doing this piece and another team that's doing that piece, but they're not talking together. And I'm like, how many steps we could remove? Because people go down this one, and then they come up, and then they go down this style and this to the two different teams. I'm like, smash them together. Let's see what we can do differently when we put those things together because these can be big projects. So it's those kinds of details. **Harry Stebbings** [20:08]: How do you and and I'm not being too sycophantic to you here, but like how do you extrapolate yourself up enough to go, okay, let's remove ourselves from the details and let's look at what we can do to remove 10 steps, not one. Because it's so easy to get so ingrained in the minutiae that you can't extrapolate yourself up to that level to see from that view. How do you retain the perspectives to do both, do you think? **Tony Fadell** [20:30]: Well, you have to train yourself. You have to train yourself to put the hat on from a company perspective or a designer perspective. What are all the details? Then there's another one, which is staying beginner and staying your first time customer. They don't understand the space. They're coming into this space for whatever reason because you're solving this pain. How are they gonna think about it? Thinking like they might think. And put your role playing out of like, why did this come up on the screen? I don't understand. And always just asking the dumb question. Why? Why am I being told this? What's going on? People are like they laugh about it, but I'm like, why are we doing this? Why do I even need to do this? I don't understand. So I'm always this gruff character. Like, tell me why I need to do two more steps. Convince me I need to do this. Once you get through it, then we really know what we're honing down into. So you gotta look at both from a design perspective, but you also have to look from a customer perspective and make sure the emotions and the rational pieces are all lined up all the way through that journey. **Harry Stebbings** [21:27]: Can I ask, you mentioned before about essentially trying to be too much to too many people in a lot of ways? And I find it with product marketing a lot, especially as people approach launch, they get more and more nervous that no one's gonna adopt it. And so they expand and broaden product marketing just in a desperate attempt so someone uses it. And then they mean nothing to no one. What are your, like, some big lessons for you in terms of what makes the best product marketing in that messaging that resonates? **Tony Fadell** [21:53]: That's usually what you're describing is a symptom of not getting product marketing involved at day one, day zero. Usually, it's a bunch of things getting thrown together. All these different whats are being thrown together. And then at the end, it's like, we have eight weeks. We're gonna ship this product or twelve weeks. Now go and market it. It's like, but why did we build it? Who is the target customer? It's all of those things. So all of these questions come up, then people go, why did we make this decision versus that one? Because the audience needs or the customers need this versus that. Did anyone talk to the customer? So you have to start when you start a new project, because you have to start early days. And and what I always say is build the mock press release. What is that page, page and a half press release that you're going to send out six months, nine months, a year later about that product? You talk about the audience, the problem. You talk about the solution and how you're differentiated. You talk about price and availability. You talk about regions and all that stuff. And it all happens in one page to one and a half pages. Right? Because that's all you can do when you wanna tell the world what you're building and why it matters. The faster you can make that document in the early days, it's like you're Occam's razor. You've winnowed it down enough to know that you have a great story. You know the messaging you're trying to tell. You know the audience you're going after. Now you just gotta deliver the product. That's the vessel. Now you gotta fill the vessel with the technology. Too many times, here's the technology, here's this thing. And now you gotta wrap, perfume this pig with marketing around it. And people are like, ah, it's just marketing. **Harry Stebbings** [23:22]: That's fucking bullshit. Can I ask the other thing that I think is bullshit? I think it's like the you know, like Dave Moran said, devil's in the default. I think the devil's in the neutral neutral when it comes to product marketing. There's so much product marketing which is just bland. It doesn't mean anything. And I think you've gotta be bold. You've almost gotta be arrogant and say a thousand songs in your pocket. You're not saying a great musical device. You're like, fuck, Craig. **Tony Fadell** [23:47]: Absolutely right. Dang. If you don't believe it, why should anybody else? If you believe it and you're gonna put a year or six months or two years of your life and your team's lives on the line, working nights and days and weekends and what have you and traveling all around the world to make stuff happen, why wouldn't you be bold? Why don't you go shout from the rooftops and wave the flags and go look what we've got to everyone? Either it's insecurity, either on the product or in the team. That's because you probably haven't sold yourself on it. You haven't gotten resonated because you've been just working on it as opposed to believing in it and really using that the finer points to say this is in, this is out, these kinds of things. **Harry Stebbings** [24:26]: I think it's a lack of confidence where they're fearful of putting a customer segment off by being too bold. **Tony Fadell** [24:31]: Guess what? That's called differentiation. Differentiation means I'm going to attract only a certain number of people, and I'm going to make sure it's so great for them, and hopefully, that's a big enough set that they're going to resonate with it. It's not for everybody. Are iPhones for everyone? Not everyone can afford an iPhone. No. It's for a certain set of people. Macs as well. You have to remember your target audience. If you just wanna say it's bland for everyone, well, who wants no one's excited. I want you to talk to me, not a swath of people. I want you to resonate, and I wanna hear from you what I mean to you and what this product means for me and what it's gonna do to help me. If it's just this bland stuff, that means you got bad marketing or you got a bad product or both. Right? Or and also bad leadership. You gotta stick to your guns. And I remember this very, very clearly. Steve said, Steve Jobs, the best marketing is just truth telling. As long as the product meets the expectations you set for it, the best marketing is just telling the truth. It's not all kinds of hyperbole and adjectives and all this other stuff. It's just telling the truth. And when you tell the truth and you deliver on that truth, the solution to that pain, that's when things happen. That's when things really go. Marketing people think it's just like gift wrapping something and putting bows on it and flowers and stuff like that. That is not what true marketing or product marketing is. **Harry Stebbings** [25:49]: What do you think makes the best product market is? I consistently hear from founders say the hardest role to hire for great product market is great product market. It's **Tony Fadell** [25:56]: absolutely true. **Harry Stebbings** [25:57]: What do you think makes a great product marketer and how do you Well, there's a whole chapter in the book on **Tony Fadell** [26:01]: it. One explaining what product marketing is because most people have no clue what it is. Or they think they do, but they really don't. **Harry Stebbings** [26:06]: Well, I think I know what it is, so I'm clearly wrong as well. Well, what is it? What is it? It's my fucking podcast. I ask the questions. **Tony Fadell** [26:13]: Oh, no. I hear it's a test here, buddy. No, no. Seriously, product marketing is as much of an art as is a skill. And the skill is really understanding how to communicate to various segments of customers in their language, communicating in their language in marketing, in engineering, in customer support, in finance. These product marketers, the best ones, know how to speak the languages of all these different disciplines to make sure that they're hearing what it means, why we're doing this product and what it means for finance. What it means for customer support, what it means to the various target customers. They have to have a really great ability to understand the messages that need to be told to each of these different individual segments of people, as well as understand the technology of what can actually be delivered. Because too many things is like, oh, this is a great design. It can do everything. But nobody can deliver it because no one can build it. So it's having those dialogues and finding a common ground because you're not the CEO of the product. Too many times the CEO goes, Oh yeah, the product marketing will figure out. No. Product marketing is the voice of the customer first and foremost. They are the voice of the customer who then puts together all of the things that they hear around to make a story that works for the customer and works for the business, assuming everyone else delivers. Product marketing, it can be more technical, and it can be much more consumer or more marketing driven. But it's always somewhere in between depending on the product that's coming out. Is it a highly technical product? You're gonna probably have more technical product management. If it's more consumer, you're gonna go from the probably from the mid of the tech to more consumer marketing driven things. So it really depends what the product is that's coming out. But product marketing sits in between all of these things. Almost nobody reports to them, so they have to earn respect by communicating to each team in their language and earning their trust and then putting together something that makes sense for everyone. **Harry Stebbings** [28:06]: For founders hiring product marketers, I often hear from mostly engineering led founders saying, continuously mishired because they're obviously good at marketing, and they're good at marketing themselves. And I have not detected in the interview process this. So my question to you is, what are the questions or tests or tangible things that you would do to discover really great product marketers pre hire in that interview process? **Tony Fadell** [28:30]: To me, the biggest thing is, tell me the last two or three things that knocked your socks off when you purchased it and why? What are the amazing product experiences you've had? And tell me why those are so important to you and what it means to you as a customer. And what do you think it meant to those businesses? And why internally to each of the team? So I wanna see how they put their mind into the space of the different customer segments, into the different teams inside of an organization, why it was successful, what did they throw, what did they leave out that was good that they left out, or what did they leave in that's really important they left in? Or how did they move it, evolve it from generation one to generation two, generation three, generation four? So I wanna have that kind of discussion. That's when you know if somebody's not bullshitting you because too many product marketers can come from the marketing realm, but they just understand creative and branding. Messaging is very, very different than creative marketing and communication. Messaging is the core things for why it is the way it is. It may turn into different words and visuals and videos and stuff like that. But product marketing is all about the messaging of putting all of these pieces together and making it into one cohesive story. **Harry Stebbings** [29:37]: Messaging versus creative and branding. How is it different? Just help me understand that. Sorry. **Tony Fadell** [29:42]: The difference being is I can say this product is going to save you 50% on your energy bill. Okay? You just say, we're gonna save through these combination of technology. That's what we say. It's gonna save you 50% of your energy bills through this technology. On the creative side, that wouldn't be just regurgitate that. You may show, okay, let me do creative. It's a video. And the video starts with, you got this energy bill. You were so frustrated. Oh my god, this line item was so expensive. What can I do? So you first start with a pain, and that's part of the creative. Then you say, Oh my God, I now bought this product that told me it'll save. And then it shows you, Oh, and it saved. And here's all the ways it saved you that month, and it tells you that stuff. So one thing is stating what it does. The other one is showing what it does and putting it in your context. So that's the creative angle. Do I use a tweet for that? Do I use a video for that? Do I use a blog post? What do I need to do to turn that message, bring life to it, bring a form and shape that will interact with the customers where they are. **Harry Stebbings** [30:45]: What do you do when you fucked up product marketing? So you've launched your product and the product marketing just didn't hit. The messaging didn't hit. People did not resonate. What do you do then because you've launched? You've launched with the messaging, you've launched with it. Do you walk it back? Do you change it? Do you keep it out there and push it more? What do you do then? **Tony Fadell** [31:06]: Well, first, if it didn't resonate for whatever reason and you didn't follow the steps of good product marketing, well, you didn't follow the good process to do it. Follow the process. Have something. Don't just perfume the pig at the end of development. Make sure you start initially. So let's assume that you started initially and it didn't work. Well, guess what? The iPod was a critical success, but it didn't really turn into a successful business till the third generation. And the reason being was it didn't work with Windows based PCs. It only worked with Macs, which were a fraction of the market, less than a percent of just The US, not the rest of the world. So think about that. So we came out with an amazing product, but for a very, very small audience. And then what we said was, it was all and for Steve, his opinion was, we're going to sell the iPod. It's gonna be so awesome that people will buy Macs so they could use their iPod. We're gonna sell more Macs because they're going to need to buy one to use an iPod that they're gonna have to have. Well, guess what? The first two generations, that's where we stuck with, it didn't work. People didn't buy more Mac. The reason for the iPod to exist was for people to buy more Macs, not just because we wanted to be an iPod company. It was to sell more Mac. So the third generation, we finally bit the bullet, looked at all the data, and said and convinced Steve, we have to make this Windows compatible. And then once it became Windows compatible, then people started going, oh, I like this Apple experience, but I'm only getting part of it. What could it be like on a Mac? And then the Mac sales started because the cost of the iPod before was the cost of the iPod plus a Mac, which could be 2,000, $3,000. After we made the change, the cost of the iPod was the $300 or $2.49 or whatever it was, plus your PC, and then ultimately, you bought a Mac. Right? Look. Remember yeah. I know you're too young for this, but in the nineties and early two thousands, when you walked into airport lounges, there were only PCs everywhere. And if you saw a Mac, you were lucky to see a Mac, you're like, oh my god. I gotta go talk to that guy because he's part of my tribe. Go to airport lounges today. Good luck finding anyone on a Windows PC. And if they are, it's some corporate PC they wish they never had to touch. **Harry Stebbings** [33:11]: Right? It's a ThinkPad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? **Tony Fadell** [33:14]: So, and everyone else has Macs. And that was because simply we made the switch from making the iPod only work with Mac to making it with everything, and then people started coming into the whole community of Mac lovers. **Harry Stebbings** [33:26]: We look at the products that you've worked on, and it seems kind of just like hit after hit after hit when you kinda go through it. Oh, yeah. **Tony Fadell** [33:31]: Right. **Harry Stebbings** [33:31]: I mean, this is the joy of hindsight. Can you take me to a product flop and what you learned from a product flop? **Tony Fadell** [33:37]: Product flop? **Harry Stebbings** [33:38]: Yeah. Well, it's General **Tony Fadell** [33:39]: Magic product flop. Right? General Magic was a huge one. Maybe sold a few thousand units by after $500,000,000 or more investment in the nineties. **Harry Stebbings** [33:48]: Were you a leader there? Like, as a product leader? **Tony Fadell** [33:50]: No. I wasn't a product leader. I was **Harry Stebbings** [33:52]: When you were a product leader, what's been a You went on a product **Tony Fadell** [33:54]: leader? Yeah. It was a failure? There's failure as a business, and there's failure as a product. Which one do you wanna talk about? The product failure or a business failure? **Harry Stebbings** [34:02]: I want both. **Tony Fadell** [34:03]: So let's talk about where the product met the needs, but the business failed. And that was at Philips. We were creating the Nino and Velo lines of pocket electronics. It was Windows CE based stuff. That was an embedded operating system from Windows, for mobile computing for professionals like mobile Excel and email and stuff like that. So we had critical success there. People said ours was the best product of the category by far. Everything was going well. Where it was a business failure, sales and marketing could care less inside the company. They were busy worrying about getting their bonuses for TV sales and DVD sale, player sales, and those kinds of things. We were so low on the totem pole, they could care less. They're like, yeah, just throw it out to the retailers. Let's see if this is successful. We're not gonna spend much on marketing. We're not gonna do all that stuff. And of course, it failed. That was a case where we had critical product success, but the business success didn't happen because we didn't have a good shot back in the day. There were no e tailers at that point. This is 97. Everything was about being in retail and in the mail order catalogs or what have you. And to make sure we had good merchandising, didn't have it. Good branding, didn't have it. And that's why that was a critical success, product success, but a business failure. **Harry Stebbings** [35:14]: That's one. So product success there, but business failure. What about one way? You just fucked it on the product. **Tony Fadell** [35:19]: Product? Well, one of the big ones was at Apple was the iPod Hi Fi. I don't know if anyone remembers it, but iPod Hi Fi was all about bringing big stereo sounds to fill a room with an iPod. You could dock it, and then it would have these big speakers and everything. And that was a project that was something we all believe should exist. It was too early in the market. And people are like, why am I paying $4.99 or $3.99 for an iPod high five? My iPod's only worth so much money. Why am I buying this big accessory for it? Fill the room. I'll do it some other way. Well, obviously, today we see incredibly expensive Bluetooth speakers of all forms and sizes and WiFi speakers and price points and everything else. That was the precursor. We were starting the market, but we didn't deliver it right because it was too expensive. It was overdesigned. It was all kinds of things because we didn't get the product set right. I think you saw this with the Apple HomePod. **Unknown** [36:17]: Yeah. **Tony Fadell** [36:17]: Right? The HomePod did the same thing. It was overdesigned and everything and then said, oh, we have to compete with the Mini. The Mini will compete with all the other solutions out there. So sometimes you can overshoot. The same thing happened with the original Mac Cube. The Mac Cube overshot. If you guys remember, was it was just trying too hard. **Harry Stebbings** [36:32]: What are your lessons from the overshoot, from the try too hard? **Tony Fadell** [36:36]: Here's another one, and I'll tell you. Just give another example. Like the first time the Apple Watch came out, it was trying to be a jewelry piece. Remember there was the $20,000 Yeah. Gold watch. It's when it's trying too hard. Instead of just talking about the differentiation it it is and focusing on that, it's over engineering every element. I'm gonna put it this way. You don't know when to stop. You don't have enough constraints. So that's the big thing that we had different between General Magic and iPod. Because at General Magic, we had almost unlimited funds and tons of time. What I learned at General Magic is really focus and put constraints on yourself so you're more creative and that you ship. In the case of something like the iPod HiFi, it had too big a budget. It took too long to ship. We should have much more constrained it to get to a point and then figured out if we wanted to ship it or not. That was what we did on the iPhone. We had two and a half versions, really, of the iPhone before it shipped because we kept revving it, getting to a certain point, throwing it away, trying again, getting at a certain point, throwing it away because we made constraints on time and what could actually be done. You need to have really good constraints to avoid these kinds of product nightmares. **Harry Stebbings** [37:41]: Can I ask and that's a really good one, which is like so many of my companies today have, like, three hundred months of runway, thanks to CO2 or SoftBank? How do you enforce time constraints and urgency on product teams who are sitting there going, we got so much runway, baby. **Tony Fadell** [37:56]: You decree it. A lot of times, and you see this in in VC deals now, there's certain milestones or tranches, slices of funds that come in for hitting certain milestones. So when we're raising a ton of capital, I like to see a milestone based plan for the investment. Yeah. You might have got a 150,000,000, but you're only gonna get first 50,000,000. And then the next 50,000,000 will be if you hit these milestones. Now, obviously, things can change or what have you, but I don't like to be swimming in money. I don't like any team swimming in money. I saw that too many times at other companies I've worked with or for. It does not set up for good constraints to make sure you're making great decisions because the market moves on. So you might be have one idea of what it is and you're just going for it, but you're taking a long time and the market's moving away from it. And then you finally ship it and it dies and you're so far off track that everyone's just, ugh, I don't wanna deal with this anymore. Kill it. **Harry Stebbings** [38:47]: Yeah. We've mentioned success and failure on product launch and product flop there. How do the best product leaders prevent teams that's continuously smash it from getting too arrogant? And how do they also prevent teams that flop from losing all confidence and losing morale? It **Tony Fadell** [39:03]: all comes down to leadership. And the leadership is really look, you have to have enough experience like, let's not get too ahead of ourselves. Yes, we were successful last time, but and we're raising the stakes this time because every great leader, once you hit the bar, every great leader is gonna raise those stakes a little bit more for them taking on more risk. But what you don't wanna do is take out so much risk that it's like we can conquer the world. You wanna get risks that you can mitigate, that you can see for the most part. Maybe you do a few things you don't know, and those aren't so critical. But it's the job of the leader to push, right, and to make stretch goals for things, but not so much that they're ludicrous. But stretch goals that the team believes in, that they can hit so you could leapfrog yourself from the last version. You can continue to stay differentiated moving forward. Too many times, the leader's like, oh, that was great or what have you. We're just gonna make it a little bit more, and we're just gonna never put any more risk in our way. We're just gonna have fun here at the country club now that we set it up. That's when Andy Grove had a great phrase, the paranoid survive. A great leader always has to be looking behind its back going, oh, wait a second. There's competition coming. Because if we're successful, the competition will be coming. Absolutely. Because they're gonna want what you've got. So you gotta stay ahead of yourself if you're in the league. You gotta be adding those risks, but you gotta do it in a constraint based way so that you do take bigger risks, but they're within reason. And you're not resting on your lawyers. **Harry Stebbings** [40:22]: Should competition drive product strategy? **Tony Fadell** [40:24]: No, no, absolutely not. Never. Now, maybe when you're entering a market, you have to worry about competition because you have to understand what the table stakes are, the minimum feature sets you need to have to kind of play so that you're not just giving them a new differentiated thing and all these other things that you don't have. There are basic things that they're like, we don't have that. Everyone has that. It depends if you're first to market versus you're coming into a market. But competition should inform, but it should not drive. So many times there's a CES that rolls around or some other trade show or some other every day now, we get another press release about x y z corp raising this money or partnering with this or whatever. If you read those all the time, you are gonna go crazy as a leader. If you're always tracking the competition, you're going to go crazy. So you have to understand where it is you're differentiating and know your differentiation stands. Keep your ears and eyes open for those things that competitors might be doing and then scanning them to see. But don't go chasing the competition. Don't go trying to emulate the competition because all you do is end up with a me too, and it's usually never as good. You gotta have your own healthy ego to say, I think I know best, and I think we know what was going on, and we're going to make those decisions on behalf of the customer to continue our business forward. But to say it's just competition now if competition does come out with a better product, if competition does come and womp you in some way, then you're like, what did we miss in our product marketing? What did we miss in our technology? And going back and learning from that, of course. And, yeah, maybe it'll make you to pivot or change your strategy slightly. But if you have to change really huge problems to rip up everything and change again, you probably have the wrong process for how you went to market. **Harry Stebbings** [42:04]: What makes a good postmortem? When you review, what makes a good postmortem? **Tony Fadell** [42:08]: Well, first you gotta show what you did right. What did you get right in your postmortem? What did you get wrong? And was this a macro issue or was this a micro issue? Macro issue means in the environment. Was this something that just happened? The pandemic happened. You can't blame any one business for the pandemic happening. Like that was a macro thing that affected all of us. But if we screwed up and we didn't pivot properly within that macro environment and it becomes something we didn't do right, we didn't assess it right, well then that's our problem. We didn't have the right process. So you have to really understand whether it's a macro thing, macro thing in your industry you're competing in, or if it's something internal that really was wrong. If you break it down into that, then you can better process the issues or the failures you might've had along the way so that you can spot those things in the future and try to avoid them. So you gotta tear it down. People don't wanna look failure in the face, and they need to look at unless they're gonna just walk away, and then it's truly failure. Failure becomes learnings and lessons learned if you apply those things to the next one and you go on. Right? We could've looked at the first version of the iPhone that never shipped as a failure, but we didn't. We went on to make the second one. We could look at the second one as failure, but we didn't. We made a third one, that's what ultimately shipped. Those were just learnings along the way. **Harry Stebbings** [43:21]: Do you do premortems? Final one before a quick fire. People often say about the importance of premortems predicting what could go wrong. **Tony Fadell** [43:28]: I don't think, you know, don't spend too much time on pre mortems. We spend a lot of time on that press release, the mock press release, like I said, for product marketing. I think we assess, here are the big risks of the program and make sure we enumerate those big risks of the program and make a top 10 or 15 list and have it in every product meeting that we have with the teams so that we go, how are we doing our first five risks? How are we doing on the bottom five risks? We have names associated. Where's the next step on it? So that we're always mitigating those risks. Don't shy away from them. Make them transparent for everyone to see so that we're all working on the hardest things and to make sure those things are gone. Because typically, risky things are those things on the press release. Those are their differentiation things. And people that get it towards the end of the project, and they're like, we didn't get this done, and we didn't nail this. Oh, just trim them off and we'll ship it anyway. If you go back to that core press release and you go, wait a second, three of the five things we mentioned in the press release, you wanna jettison? Guess what? We don't have a product anymore. So again, that's the Occam's razor at the beginning is if you have a good understanding of it, what it is you're doing, and it modifies over time, you know, that press release, as you see better and you modify and you make it get more streamlined. That is a great way to say this is in the product or not, because there's too many features. Everyone wants to overfeature everything. We need this. Just like you were saying at the beginning, we need to go after this customer segment. We need this because we're the competitors are doing that. It's like, no, guys. This is the right thing. Did something change fundamentally on this press release in the competitive set and the technology set and the environment to not allow this to exist? If so, what is it? And let's address it. If not, let's move on and and stick with our guns here. **Harry Stebbings** [45:02]: Okay. First quick fire question. How do you keep and integrate product marketing so tightly with product to ensure really great communications between the two? **Tony Fadell** [45:12]: Well, they come to all the meetings, first and foremost. But secondly, this is the art of the product management position, is they know to go in the hallway conversations or having offline conversations, going to lunches with people on the different parts of the product team or on the marketing team or whatever, and just getting to know people, right? It's building those relationships. It shouldn't just be all happening in a meeting. This is all about relationships and building trust and saying, I'm gonna share things when things aren't going right at certain parts of the project or certain parts of marketing. You have their ear to the ground, hear about these things and go, we need to address this. The team's really not feeling confident in the schedule about this. We need to look into it because if we can't make this feature happen in the schedule, we got real problems. So let's go swarm on that. Let's go figure it out. So these people are not just formal voices of the customer. They're informal leaders in the team that are putting together these networks of people in different aspects of the project to then be able to read the tea leaves, so to speak. The things that are unsaid in those big meetings. **Harry Stebbings** [46:09]: What are the single biggest mistakes you see founders make hiring their product teams today? **Tony Fadell** [46:14]: Well, first, founders typically are the product managers. They don't normally go and hire product management because sometimes they don't know what it is. Or they're like, I'm a product manager, and that's the fun part. I like being the product manager, and it is a lot of fun. But when you start growing past your 20 people, there is so much work to do product management right. You need a person who's the voice of customer watching over all this, because as a founder, CEO, leader, you have so many other things to do. And I'm sorry, you don't get to do the stuff that you love to do. You get to do all the stuff that no one else is, and talking to customers and filling the cracks and finding the issues and reviewing work, not doing the work. You need to hire someone in the product marketing thing to drive it and build it and make sure they're always sitting there as a voice of customer. Now you sit on top of all that, making sure everyone's doing their jobs and everything. And it's not like you can't engage in the product management discussion, of course. But just like anything, I was an engineer. Should I be engineering when I'm a CEO? No. If I love product marketing and I was a product marketer, now I'm a CEO, should I be doing product marketing? Sure, from a review perspective, but not doing it, just like you wouldn't be doing it if you were an engineer or salesperson. So stop it. Hire and build the right team around product marketing and make sure it's a separate team. It's not marketing, it's not communications, it's not engineering, it's not project management, it's something else. Just like when design used to be embedded in engineering and stuff like that. Now design has been, oh, we have to have design. It has to be at the end user experience. It has to be reporting the CEO. Well, product management is just as important. **Harry Stebbings** [47:41]: Penultimate one for you. What do you want to achieve with your book, Tony? Why did you do it? **Tony Fadell** [47:46]: Why did I do it? Well, Build Build is really a set of lessons. It's an advice encyclopedia, mentorship in a box. It is those thirty years of Silicon Valley and all the failings and the learnings coming together in trying to be concise to people building things that are usually doing something really hard, something new that the world's never seen. If you can get a few of those tips and maybe some of these will help you see more clearly, all of these tricks and advice, it's all human nature based. This is not about some kind of engineering trick. This is about human nature. And this is about how to harness the brilliant humans in yourself and in in your teams or the teams you create and your customers and engaging with them in the right way to create and build the thing that you want to build and hopefully be successful at it. The only reason why I'm sitting here today is because of all the people who helped me along the path, not for financial gain, but through my career path. They spotted something in me, I guess, or the way I talked or who knows it was and said, I'm gonna help that guy. And I'd go and ask them for advice, they give me advice for free, and they help out. And it would become a two way street as I got more and more experienced over time. But people helped to pull me up. Well, just before COVID, I was pinching myself going, my God, this is such an amazing life. And it's been such a life of learnings and all of these things. How did I get here? And I thought about it, about all these mentors that I had. And then I thought most of them had died. And I was like, now I think the baton has been passed to me. I think it's time for me that I need to give back and be a mentor and pull other people up. And I could do that, and we were already doing that at Future Shape with mentors with money, the way we think about things. But I was like, what could be broader? **Harry Stebbings** [49:26]: What? Tony, I thought you were sitting here today because you loved hanging out with me. What is going on? I'm like, crap. That's a terrible answer. Okay. I wanna finish, my friend, on the final one, which is you said before you like to ask the question of, like, what one company, product, first mile, or experience did you really, really resonate with and love? If you think back to the last one for you, what was yours where you were blown away by it? **Tony Fadell** [49:48]: One of my very first, the Atari 2,600. There was the Apple two. There was the Sony Walkman. Those are all the things that I love when I was a kid, and those are blow up. What was the most recent one? That's a great question. What's the most recent blow away product experience that I had? **Harry Stebbings** [50:03]: So mine was actually something a present from the Chainsmokers, the band. They sent me a box of lost crumb cookies. Alex in those Yeah. Alex and Drew. They sent me lost crumb cookies and they came in this big box and it opened beautifully. You know when you open a box and it just does it so beautifully and then each cookie's hand wrapped. When you zip it, unzip it, it's a beautiful unzip, and it feels nice as a package. **Tony Fadell** [50:26]: Well, I'll tell you the Nothing ear ones, so Nothing, the brand, the ear ones, they say, okay. Yes. Full disclosure, I'm an investor. **Harry Stebbings** [50:35]: Full disclosure, I'm not. I'm not, and I use that nothings. Okay. So you're using yeah. Yeah. Yeah. **Tony Fadell** [50:41]: I think maybe you had the same product experience. There was the buying online. There was the community. There was getting it. There was unwrapping it, taking it out, then using it, and it really worked. And it hit the price point. Like, to me, is it the next iPhone? No. Is it the next whatever? But does it deliver on what they said and set the expectations high enough, and then they even bested those? To me, that is where it all comes together as that's an amazing experience, and that's something that you can learn from. **Harry Stebbings** [51:09]: Listen. I totally agree. I love Carl. Pissed I didn't do that first round with when Buckley brought it to me, I was like, hardware company? Fuck off. You should've talked to me. Oh, no. But listen, Tony, I love this. You're a hero. Thank you so much. **Tony Fadell** [51:23]: Thank you. Thank you, Harry. And one last thing for your listeners out there, we are starting a climate fund. It's called Build Climate Fund. All proceeds, all net proceeds that are coming to me or what have you, are going to a fund called the Build Climate Fund. I'm going to match all of those proceeds 5x, and we're only going to be investing in climate crisis companies, startups doing real stuff for helping the climate. And that money will be evergreen. So any profits, any principal that comes back from those events, it goes back into supporting more and more companies, helping the climate crisis. And if any money is ever taken out, then profits, those are gonna go directly into climate saving charities. **Harry Stebbings** [52:05]: I have to say, I'm so grateful for my relationship with Tony. As you could tell there, we had a lot of fun and one of the most special guests always to have on the show. Such exciting times there with the Climate Fund, with Build. As I said, Build really is fantastic, so do check it out. So many learnings. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [52:20]: in the ever changing landscape of work, how can you ensure your people, work flows, data stay connected? Well, this is how. Airtable allows you to create flexible systems that help your team operate as one, break down the barriers that leave teams feeling disconnected. With Airtable, your team works from a single source of truth that is always up to date. With their plug and play approach, individual contributors have the flexibility to build tools that fit the unique way they work. No code required. Airtable is bridging the information gap and bringing teams like ours together. Give it a try for free at airtable.com today. That's airtable.com to get started for free. And speaking of amazing products like Airtable there, product leaders trust product board to enable their teams to build products that matter. From start ups to industry titans, over 5,000 companies rely on product board to get the right products to market faster, including Microsoft, Zoom, UiPath, and Gainsight to name a few. Product board can help you create a scalable, transparent, and standardized process so your PMs really understand what their customers need and then prioritize the right features to build next. Stakeholders feel the love too with an easy to view roadmap that automatically updates so everyone knows what you're building and why. Make data driven product decisions that result in higher revenue and user adoption. Your product teams will be empowered to create delightful customer experiences. Visit productboard.com/teams to learn more. As always, I so appreciate all your support, and I cannot wait to bring you an incredible episode on Friday with Ravi at NewView.