I was assigned to build an infrared network to work between devices (like how a remote connects to a TV) — so I reinvented all seven layers of a protocol stack. […] But eventually a more experienced engineer got around to looking at what I'd coded and, baffled, asked why I'd built a network protocol that way. I answered that I didn't know I was building a network protocol.

Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.

The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error. — Anonymous

There was a whole world of thinking that was needed before a line of code should be written.

Nothing in the world feels better than helping your hero in a meaningful way and earning their trust — watching them realize you know what you’re talking about, that you can be relied on, that you’re someone to remember.

Becoming a manager is a discipline. Management is a learned skill, not a talent. You're not born with it. You'll need to learn a whole slew of new communication skills and educate yourself with web-sites, podcasts, books, classes, or help from mentors and other experienced managers.

Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanage-ment. Your job is to make sure the team produces high-quality work. It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.

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.

You can say, "Help me." If you're a first-time manager of simply new to the company or group, just tell people.» I’m doing this for the first time. I'm still learning. Please tell me what I can do to make things better." That's it. But that's a huge mindset shift.

If you’re a manager — congratulations, you’re now a parent. Not because you should treat your employees like children, but because it’s now your responsibility to help them work through failure and find success. And to be thrilled when they do.

[…] it's your responsibility as a manager or a leader to explain that this isn't a democracy, that this is an opinion-driven decision and you're not going to reach the right choice by consensus. But this also isn't a dictatorship. You can't give orders without explaining yourself.

Start with kindness. Try to make peace. Assume the best. .. and if that doesn't work, then remember that what goes around comes around. Although it never comes fast enough.

Just because you don’t know of any other better options doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

You should talk to people and make connections because you’re naturally curious. You want to know how other teams at your company work and what people do.

Most people at the top are interested to hear what’s happening down below.

You absolutely cannot threaten to quit, then hesitate and flip-flop and stay. Everyone will instantly lose respect for you. You have to follow through.

Quitting should never be a negotiating tactic — it should be the very last card you play.

Before you quit, you’d better have a story. A good, credible, and factual one. You’ll need to have a rationale for why you left. And you’ll need one for why you want to join whatever company you’re heading to next. These should be two very different narratives. You’ll need them for the interview, but also for yourself—to make sure you’ve really thought things through. And to make sure you’re making the right choice for the next job.

Your story about why you left needs to be honest and fair and your story for your next job needs to be inspiring: this is what I want to learn, this is the kind of team I want to work with, this is part of the mission that truly excites me.

So I figured — screw it. I’ll do it myself. The words that launched a thousand startups.

So don’t just make a prototype of your product and think you’re done. Prototype as much of the full customer experience as possible.

You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters.

Your product isn’t only your product.

But they didn’t understand that it wasn’t a straight COGS line item. It was a marketing expense. And a support expense. That screwdriver saved us so much money on phone support. Instead of angry calls, we had happy customers raving online about their great experience.

When a company gives that kind of care and attention to every part of the journey, people notice. Our product was good, but ultimately it was the whole journey that defined our brand. That’s what made Nest special. It’s what makes Apple special. It’s what allows businesses to reach beyond their product and create a connection not with users and consumers, but with human beings. It’s how you create something that people will love.

[Storytelling]: - It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides.
- It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. - It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”

The story of your product, your company, and your vision should drive everything you do.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both.

The key is to find the right balance — not so disruptive that you won’t be able to execute, not so easy to execute that nobody will care. You have to choose your battles. Just make sure you have battles.

But that’s the tricky thing with disruptions—they’re an extremely delicate balancing act. When they fall apart it’s usually for one of three reasons: 1. You focus on making one amazing thing but forget that it has to be part of a single, fluid experience. 2. Conversely, you start with a disruptive vision but set it aside because the technology is too difficult or too costly or doesn’t work well enough. So you execute beautifully on everything else but the one thing that would have differentiated your product withers away. 3. Or you change too many things too fast and regular people can’t recognize or understand what you’ve made.

You should also keep in mind that you’re not just making V1 or V2 of your product — you’re building out the first or second version of your team and processes.

Most people don’t realize what the iPod was originally built for. Its purpose wasn’t just to play music—it was made to sell Macintosh computers. […] So as far as Steve Jobs was concerned, the iPod would never work with a PC. That would completely defeat the point — we needed to sell more computers.

The critics loved it. So did the people who already had Apple computers. Unfortunately, at that time there weren’t many of them.

The iPod cost $399. The entry-level iMac cost $1,300. Even though the iPod was by far the best MP3 player on the market, nobody was going to drop $1,700 on the complete Apple package just to listen to Radiohead more easily.

The lesson is about when and how vision and data should guide your decisions. In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else.

Here’s the trick: write a press release. But don’t write it when you’re done. Write it when you start.

To write a good press release you have to focus. The press release is meant to hook people — it’s how you get journalists interested in what you’re making. You have to catch their attention. You have to be succinct and interesting, highlight the most important and essential things that your product can do.

Then weeks or months or years later, as you’re getting close to finishing, as you’re debating what makes it in, what gets cut, what matters, what doesn’t — take out your press release. Read it.

If you launched right now, could you more or less send that press release into the world and have it be mostly true? If the answer is yes, then congratulations: your product is probably ready, or at least pretty close.

No problem. Write another press release. Rinse. Repeat.

This is an adventure and adventures never go according to plan. That’s what makes them fun. And scary. And worth doing.

Every project needs a heartbeat.

Each team’s heartbeat will be different — a creative team is going to have a very different heartbeat than an engineering team; a company that makes hardware is going to have slower team rhytms than companies that only push around electrons. It doesn’t matter what that heartbeat is, your job is to keep it steady so your team knows what’s expected of them.

You typically need to create at least three generations of any new, disruptive product before you get it right and turn a profit: 1. Not remotely profitable. 2. Making unit economics or gross margins. 3. Making business economics or net margins.

Until you optimize the business, not just the product, you can never build something lasting.

When we started work on the Nest Protect smoke and CO alarm, our second product, you’d think it would be easier. That everything we’d built already would let us skip a few steps. But the second you start a new product, you have to hit the restart button — even if you’re at a big company.

You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business.

Every product. Every company. Every time.

We worked hard not to think about work.

A fantastic manager — focused on team building, never afraid to ask questions or push boundaries, insatiably curious about every aspect of the business.

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamin pills are good for you, but they’re not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference. But you’ll notice real quick if you forget a painkiller.

That’s what you need when you’re going to start a company or start a huge new project — a coach. A mentor. A source of wisdom and aid. Someone who can recognize a brewing problem and warn you about it before it happens. And someone who will quietly inform you that it’s dark right now because your head is jammed up your own ass, and who will give you a few tips to quickly remove it.

Find an operational, smart, useful mentor who has done it before, who likes you and wants to help.

[VCs] It’s a particularly brutal form of dating — but instead of asking to buy them a drink, you’re begging them for money. It ain’t fun.

Another thing: you’ll never hear «it’s not you, it’s me.» It’s always you.

If you cater to both [B2B and B2C], your marketing still has to be B2C.

If you have to think about work all the time but you don’t want to think about work all the time — then you need to have a system.

You have to find a way to stay sane — to manage the inevitable swirling morass of tasks and meetings and plans and questions and problems and progress and fears. And you have to architect your schedule so your body and brain don’t get burned out or bloated beyond recognition.

I took several sheets of paper with me everywhere. They had all the top milestones in front of us for each of the disciplines — engineering, HR, finance, legal, marketing, facilities, etc. — and everything we needed to do to reach those milestones.

The act of using a pen, then retyping and editing later, forced me to process information differently

But you do need to prioritize your tasks, manage and organize your thoughts, and create a predictable schedule for your team to access those thoughts.

And then you need to take a break.

A real break. Take a walk or read a book or play with your kid or lift some weights or listen to music or just lie on the ground, staring at the ceiling. Whatever you need to do to stop your mind from frantically spinning in circles about work. . Look at your calendar. Engineer it. Design it.

Culture is the hardest thing to pinpoint and the hardest to preserve.

Culture arises organically but then needs to be codified to be maintained.

Write down your company values and post them on your physical and virtual walls. Share them with new employees. If you don’t explicitly know your values, you can’t pass them on, maintain them, evolve them, or hire for them.

Everything that needs to be created needs to be designed — not just products and marketing, but processes, experiences, organizations, forms, materials. At its core, designing simply means thinking through a problem and finding an elegant solution. Anyone can do that. Everyone should.

Not everyone can be a great designer, but everyone can think like one.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. You can’t just make an ad and think you’re done. The ad leads to a website that sends you to a store where you purchase a box that contains a guide that helps you with installation, after which you’re greeted by a welcome email.

The entire experience has to be designed together, with different touchpoints explaining different parts of your messaging to create a consistent, cohesive experience.

Most importantly, product managers are the voice of the customer. They keep every team in check to make sure they don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal — happy, satisfied customers.

The founder or team lead often plays the role of the product manager in the beginning. They define the vision. […] The trouble comes when the team grows.

Engineers like to build products using the coolest new technology. Sales wants to build products that will make them a lot of money. But the product manager’s sole focus and responsibility is to build the right products for their customers. That’s the job.

Product management is less a well-defined role and more of a set of skills.

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles. […] But from my experience that’s a grevious mistake. 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.

Building a product isn’t like assembling an IKEA chair. You can’t just hand people instructions and walk away. Building a product is like making a song.

There’s no four-year college degree for product management, no obvious source you can hire from. Amazing product managers usually emerge from other roles. They start in marketing or engineering or support, but because they care so deeply about the customer, they start fixing the product and working to redefine it, rather than just executing someone else’s spec or messaging.

They create the experience they need to become great product managers.

As CEO, you spend almost all your time on people problems and communication. You’re trying to navigate a tangled web of professional relationships and intrigues, listen to but also ignore your board, maintain your company culture, buy companies or sell your own, keep people’s respect while continually pushing yourself and the team to build something great even though you barely have time to think about what you’re building anymore. It’s an extremely weird job.

I tore apart [each article] until [it] gently guided customers to understanding rather than just bark[ed] confusing instructions at them.

Great companies are bought, not sold.

The things you make — the ideas you chase and the ideas that chase you — will ultimately define your career. And the people you chase themwith may define your life.

Common sense is common, but it isn’t evenly distributed.