Tony Fadell

Couldn’t be happier or more humbled. #BUILD is a @nytimes Bestseller. I learned A LOT writing #Buildbook w/the best co-writer I could’ve ever dreamt of @dina323 nytimes.com/books/best-sel…

Spotlighting 75 product changes. And, each of these came from real customer problems. That's discipline! Listening, building, and improving. This is what turns a product into a true partner for small businesses. Fix friction. Earn trust. Compound over time. Always thinking about the customer Gusto, great job! 👏 #GustoShowcase

Congratulations Tim Cook on one of the most consequential leadership runs in tech. This year marks 50 years of Apple, and Tim has led Apple through a defining stretch of that history. Now with John Ternus stepping into the CEO role, the next chapter @Apple begins. People don’t choose products. They choose experiences they can trust. Apple has always been built on that trust with users, with teams, and in products. This transition is continuing that trust. Nothing but respect. Looking forward to the next 50 years of Apple. Thank you Tim and best to you John. I will always be cheering Apple on. And, I will always push Apple to be better! Because I love Apple. We all do.

Builders build. Then they ship. Then they solve what breaks. Launch isn’t the finish line. It’s where reality starts. Great products aren’t defined at launch...they’re defined by how they perform in the real world. With the #iPod it took us a few generations to truly get it right. We built and shipped the first version of the iPod in 9 months- greenlit in March 2001, announced that October and began shipping in November. Then we fixed, iterated, and produced a product that lasted many years, and ultimately paved the way for the #iPhone. Many of us still love our iPods! That’s what happens when you stay with the product. Trust comes from what happens after release and from doing the hard parts: scaling, supporting, improving. Focus on what’s real: working product, real customers, real outcomes. That’s the difference between hype and something that lasts.

So what do you do when you're stuck with a manager who's hellbent on driving off a cliff, ideally while throwing all their money out the window at some consultants? Or what if you have data but it's inconclusive - nobody can say for sure where it leads? Or what if you need to convince your team to follow you even though you can't prove you're heading in the right direction? You tell a story. Storytelling is how you get people to take a leap of faith to do something new. It's what all our big choices ultimately come down to – believing a story we tell ourselves or that someone else tells us. Creating a believable narrative that everyone else can latch onto is critical to moving forward and making hard choices. It's all that marketing comes down to. It's the heart of sales. And right now you're selling – your vision, your gut, your opinion. So don't just hit them with the classic "This is Jane, this is her life, and this is how her life changes when she uses our product" slide. Helping people see things from the customer's perspective is a critical tool, but it's just part of what you need to do. Your job in this moment is to craft a narrative that convinces leadership that your gut is trustworthy, that you've found all the data that could be gleaned, that you have a track record of good decisions, that you truly understand your customers and their needs and - most importantly- that what you're proposing will have a positive impact on the business. If you tell that story well, if you bring people along with you on that journey, then they will follow your vision, even if there's no hard data to back you up. - #BUILD Chapter 2.2 Data Versus Opinion

We learned how important understanding the user was at Nest. When we started building, we put early prototypes in real homes. We thought the magic was in the sensors, software, and machine learning. But we quickly realized when we tested on real users, people kept reaching for the dial! The dial became a part of what made the product feel alive. So, this was something we obsessed over: the turn, the click, the feel. We learned this from real people using the product.

Learned a lot from @gregjoz over the years 🙏

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making. I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life. The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context. And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them. - #BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs

50 years of @Apple From the early days of the #iPod to bringing the #iPhone into the world, some of the most formative years of my career were spent there. The products and teams stay with you. But more importantly so does how Apple thinks. A few lessons that have held true for decades: 1) Start with the user, not the tech. The question isn’t “what can we build?” but “what problem actually matters?” 2) Focus is everything. Apple is defined as much by what it says no to as what it builds. 3) End-to-end matters. Hardware, software, services. It all has to work together. 4) Details are the product. What feels small is what users remember. 5) Debate hard. Commit fully. 6) Build for the long term. We’re in another moment of massive technological change. The fundamentals haven’t changed. The companies that win build things people actually use and can’t imagine living without. Congrats to everyone who has been part of Apple’s first 50 years! 🙌

My first computer!!! My grandfather, a teacher and school superintendent and a forever tinkerer, taught me how to use tools and build things. I discovered computers when I was around 12 years old. My grandfather told me he would match whatever I made to buy my first computer, so I caddied at a local golf club to save money to buy my first Apple II. When I was younger, I would read MacWorld and other computer magazines, I dreamed of working with the team responsible for creating Apple’s Macintosh computer! This @verge piece 👏 Apple II Forever!

One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team – give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine. - #BUILD Chapter 2.1 Just Managing

DO. FAIL. LEARN. Failure isn’t the end. It’s how we get better. And I’ve had my fair share of it over the years. Startups don’t always succeed, but how you talk about the journey matters. Building a startup is hard, harder than hard. The pressure is real. The stakes are real. And when things don’t work out, it’s not easy to talk about. When I see founders sharing their stories with a level of honesty, that stands out to me. The ones who say: Here’s what worked and what didn’t Here’s what we learned along the way Here’s what we’d do differently next time They’re not just closing a chapter, they’re showing how they think. They thank their teams. They appreciate their investors. They reflect on what they’d do differently. There’s humility. There’s clarity. There’s growth. And that’s what builds trust. There’s no shame in the outcome, only in not learning from it. The best founders I know don’t get everything right the first time. But they do take ownership. They do learn fast. And they do come back stronger. That’s who you want to build with. That’s who you want to back. You don’t fail when something doesn’t work. You only fail when you give up, when you don’t learn from the failure, adapt, and then try again. Respect to anyone who’s taken the risk to build something from nothing. And even more respect to those who keep building.

Knowing your destination lets you self-prioritize and make decisions about what you're doing and how you're doing it. But, it's also bigger than that. You want to make sure the direction you're headed in still feels right-that you still believe in it. - #BUILD Chapter 1.4 Don't (Only) Look Down

Before you decide to be a manager, you should think hard about whether it's the right path for you. Because you don't have to do it. Especially if you don't really want to, but believe the management ladder is the only way to move up in your career. A lot of people shouldn't be forced into management – if you're really not a people person, or you only want to focus on the work, or you thrive on having regular day to-day successes and accomplishments and the murky maybe-your-team-will-succeed-one-day-style of management is less motivating to you. - #BUILD Chapter 2.1 Just Managing

The #iPod is back! It never really left… Not because Apple relaunched it. But because people are digging them out of drawers and sharing their iPod with their kids, younger siblings, or nieces/nephews.  Why the resurgence of the #iPod No notifications. No feeds. No algo deciding what you should hear. iPod = 1,000 songs in your pocket (THEN and NOW!) One job. Done well. Whether or not Apple ever revives the iPod as a new product, the lesson isn’t about a device, it’s about why focus matters. We need to remember why the iPod worked and was so loved and is still loved. @KalleyHuang @nytimes 🙏 nytimes.com/2026/03/01/tec…

It's all too easy to turn 1:1s into friendly chats that go nowhere, so you need to have a process for your teams meetings, your weekly meetings with individuals should have an agenda, a clear purpose, and should be beneficial to both sides. You should get the info you need about product development and your team members should get insights into how they're doing. Try to see the situation from their point of you – talk about their fears and your own concerns out loud, reframe your thoughts so they can hear feedback, understand the goals, clear up ambiguities or concerns. And don't be scared of admitting that you don't know all the answers.

- #BUILD Chapter 2.1 Just Managing

Beyond thrilled to be sitting down at the Commonwealth Club in SF next Thursday (26th) with the one and only Michael Lewis to discuss my new book. I hope you can make it, & I will do all I can to make sure we hear from him as well! commonwealthclub.org/events/2026-02…

The one & only @tfadell was one of the key influences in "pushing" me to write a book. "You have to! Best thing I ever did." He was referring of course to Build. Considering all Tony has accomplished, that landed hard. Thanks for the inspiration. a.co/d/0d4wk8FX a.co/d/05M0cR0z

MUST-READ! just released. instant #1 best-seller for finding success in LIFE (@tfadell + @bgurley + @wolfejosh + @altcap + Sam Steinman) amazon.com/Runnin-Down-Dr…

Order and read immediately! 👏 @bgurley Runnin’ Down a Dream launch day let’s gooooo!