Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:05:40 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
Were we as good as a hardware keyboard? No. But were we good enough? Yes. And then other people came to that conclusion, but at the same time, there were other people who were adamant that the hardware keyboard has to be there, and they were unrelenting. And so it came down to... So this was a classic, like I say in Build, data versus opinion-based decision. And if you think about it, you had data that said there was pros and cons on both sides. And what happened was the data was not clear that we should choose one over the other. And Steve said, "We are going this way." Enough other people kind of said, "Yeah, that seems like that's the right thing to do. We're going to get close enough to get there." And then other people were like, " No, my opinion is this." And guess who wins at the end of the day? Steve Jobs' opinion does. [00:06:34] S1: Steve Jobs.
00:06:34 · Tony Fadell
[00:06:34] S0: And he was like, "If you're not going to get on board, get out of this room, and you can go work on another project, but you're not going to work on this one." When you're doing a 1.0 of anything, when you're doing... if you're doing anything that matters, and it's a 1.0, and it's a new category, or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before, you have very few analogs that you can use to make data-driven decisions. And so if most of your decisions are going to be opinion-based decisions for a 1.0, you have to have one or two or a very, very small set of people who are charged with making the opinion-based decisions and can actually get you from point A to... from a white paper or a white... bank sheet of white paper or whiteboard to an actual 1.0 spec. Because if you try to do data-driven decisions all the way along, you're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing, or you're just getting just bullshit data, right. So you're going to have to figure out how to get opinion-based decisions to happen, and that means you have to have, for lack of a better word, taste makers. This is what we are doing. We are the person or the team who is going to make those opinion-based decisions. Of course, some people aren't going to like it, and it's going to be like, "I'm sorry, this is a benevolent dictatorship. This is what's going to happen, and this is the vision." And we don't know what we don't know until we ship it and we get opinions from the users. Now it's very different when you do this in a B2B context versus a B2C context. And so the hardest environment to work with it when you have these opinion-based distinctions is in a B2C context because you have to see these decisions in the full light and you don't... a consumer does. They have to see it from the marketing, from how they discover it in the marketing, the key feature sets, the ability to use the product, all of these different things for them to actually come up with an opinion of what they like, and what they don't like and being able to critique it. And if you don't... And if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen, you're not going to get that from consumers ever.
00:09:38 · Tony Fadell
You have to ship it, and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness, so that when they do the evaluation, and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback. When it comes to consumer... atoms-based products with services or not, whatever it is, you have to build the entire thing and visualize the entire thing to be able to make those opinion-based decisions. And so you need a small team who's looking at the marketing angles, the engineering angles, the sales angles, all those different things to go, "Okay, that's the way we're going." And there's only so many ways you can do it because the rest of the team doesn't see this either. And so you have to be very articulate about how... what that opinion-based decision is made for, why, how it might affect market, how you do it, and make sure the team understands it. Now, if the team is just fully against it, well then maybe it has to be unkind, but hopefully if you've done a good job and you really have an informed gut and you can articulate that, you can get everybody moving in the same direction even if it is... And it's going to be risky. You're right. You got to know that you got to take risk because most people in those other functions, they don't want to take any risks. And so there's someone who's got to be the target, right. And today, in many contexts, people go and hire consultants, right. They go and hire, "Okay, we're going to do a user study, or we're going to do all this." And they don't have the user studies and have the full context like I was just describing. They don't go buy the product, and they don't what have you and then they get data, and that's because the leader or whoever's in there, board maybe, it's like, "We need data to make sure this 1.0 is going to be a success." And I saw this so many times at all these major corporations, so they're just kind of covering their with bullshit data and not really doing the hard work of saying, "I'm going to make this decision and we are going to select this, and yes, I might be wrong or we as the opinion based decision makers are wrong and we will correct it later and we'll take the heat for that." So that's the... a great product manager or a great person who's leading this thing has to understand that that's what they have to do if they're really doing something innovative.
00:12:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:12:57] S1: So what I'm hearing here is just the power, especially in a consumer product, of a singular vision of a singular leader that drives it, that is... basically relies on their instinct and their taste and their experience. [00:13:09] S0: And a lot of... But again, a lot of informed judgment from all the experts around asking questions, refining, prototyping these kinds of things to then make a decision. So it's not just like, I woke up one morning, and this is... now it's we're going this direction. No, there's a lot of work to get there. [00:13:29] S1: I want to come back to the idea of micromanaging, which a lot of people... to a lot of people that word is bad and don't be a micromanager. You advocate for creating great products, you need to actually be really micromanaging. Just speak to that, what people you think miss about the importance and power of micromanaging as a leader.
00:13:46 · Tony Fadell
[00:13:46] S0: We've heard the term sweat the details. It's micromanagement of certain details, and then there's the kind of hands-off of other details. You have to really understand the blend of which things really matter, which things don't. When I was early on my career, I thought everything mattered, and I drove everybody nuts, drove myself nuts, the people hated... And it became my... became like, everybody's got to do it the way I would do it. It's like, no, no, no, no. There's only a few key things, mostly for the customer or maybe some certain things from manufacturing or cost or something where it needs to really be very clear or a long-term vision. But then you can delegate other things, but certain pieces of it you really need to... And when I mean micromanage, it means micromanage the decision, not necessarily the operations of doing it, making sure you're getting the data like we did with the keyboard on the iPhone to make sure we're getting the right data to help us get the informed gut to make that opinion-based decision. And so it's the micro specification and delivery of those certain data pieces that you need, and maybe it's also to get out of a crisis, or maybe it's a system-level thing where you have to worry about this thing at the low level changing up here and here, and like, "We could do that, but only if they do this and this." It's like, "Okay, guys, we're going to fix all of those things at once." And you have to micromanage it because everybody wants to find the excuses why they can't do that, or they can't do that. So you have to ask why a lot. So it just... But it's all in service of some really key detail that needs to get delivered or some innovation that needs to be delivered. Just like, like I said, the keyboard, we had to do the hardware, we had to do the software, we had to do the filtering. We had to do how it was... how the graphics were done on the screen. So you had all of these layers that had to keep constantly changing and adjusting. And sometimes you have to micromanage that because there's just too many variables and someone has to be the orchestrator of this huge orchestra of many different components to kind of make it all come together and be harmonious.
00:15:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:15:57] S1: I want to go in a slightly different direction. I want to talk about the Nest. [00:16:00] S0: The thermostat, I'm assuming? [00:16:02] S1: Thermostat. Yeah. Versus, what? [inaudible 00:16:05]- [00:16:04] S0: Well, there were many other products. [00:16:06] S1: All the other [inaudible 00:16:06]. Right. [00:16:06] S0: Yeah. [00:16:08] S1: Yeah. Man, the smoke alarm, is that discontinued by the way, the smoke alarm? Yeah. I just... [00:16:08] S0: Oh. [00:16:08] S1: Yeah. Okay, sorry. [00:16:14] S0: You just... What do you... Why are you... You want to stab me in the heart? [inaudible 00:16:17]. That was one of the toughest products I and our team at Nest and other people who were on the team have ever made their life because it's so hard to make something like that. There's so many constraints. That's an ultimate constraint kind of product to actually innovate in. So, yes, it unfortunately is discontinued, but it was the best product in the space for a decade, and no one changed it, no one invested in it. It is so crazy. It pains me, and it pains everyone. People are like, "They're expiring around me. What do I do?" And I'm like, "I wish I could tell you there's something better." No one replaced it with something better. It's mind-boggling that the number one product with revenue and everything, you're just going to toss it away. [00:17:04] S1: Why do you think that's happening? [00:17:05] S0: Because it was an orphan. [00:17:06] S1: It's just not a big enough business within Google [inaudible 00:17:08]- [00:17:08] S0: It's a stepchild. No, no. It was-