Tony Fadell on opinion-based decisions and what made Steve Jobs great

Um, you know, you're one of the fascinating humans in the history of Silicon Valley. Steve is another one of those. So those two humans came together for a time to work together. What was it like working with Steve Jobs? What aspect of his behavior and personality, let's say, brought out the best in you?

Pushing you, really pushing you, relentless on the details, challenging you for the right reasons. It wasn't bullying, it wasn't demeaning. He would critique the work, not judge the person, at least not in front of them or inside of, you know, in front of a group or anything like that. No, it was really that attention to detail and he, when he would make a decision, you know, there are, when you make the first version of anything, something revolutionary. There are a lot of opinion based decisions and there's only one or two people, three people who hold those opinion based decisions and what they should be. And when you have those opinions and you're trying to work with the team to implement those decisions, you have to really tell the why of those decisions. Just don't go do it. But why it's there so you can feel part of that decision. You can understand what were the trade offs of the different other answers to that opinion. Right. And say, this is the reason why we picked the robot we picked because it's this for the customer or this for the overall story, what have you, so that you felt really good. Because a lot of times most people want a data driven decision, but with V1s you don't get data. Right. Maybe in a B2B you could a little bit because you can talk to customers, but you can't do that with a consumer problem.

V1 version 1B2B business to business versus.

What'S the alternative business to consumer. V1 okay, which is defining some terms. Yes, you're Absolutely.

And when you say data driven decisions.

Versus what opinion based decisions.

So like gut you have to use, you don't have any.

You can't fall back on any data or any previous history to kind of inform you of what's going on. Right. And so if you look at most companies who are paralyzed and cannot make new innovations and new products, it's because they're trying to turn, and this is what I saw at Philips, they're trying to turn opinion based decisions into data driven decisions so they don't lose their jobs. So if you look at management consulting, management consulting is all about taking those opinion based decisions, giving them to someone else to turn into data that comes back to them and says they can blame the Management consultants. Yeah. When something goes wrong, as opposed to it wasn't me.

Yeah, right.

When you need to have to tell that story, you have to understand that especially V1, you need to be able to articulate those, those opinion based decisions and you need to own them. And if you fail with some of them, you didn't get it right. You, you then own them and fix them and move on. Right. Version one of the iPod wasn't perfect. Version one of the iPhone wasn't perfect. We got a lot of opinion based decisions wrong. But as you go through that, because you got more data, because V2, you had data on those original opinions and then you were able to then modulate off of that. Right. And you still have new opinions because those are differentiators that you, that we call differentiators, that the things that, you know, move the, move the product forward in its evolution, but at the revolution stage. Opinions, opinions, opinions, no data.

And so you have this discussion, you and Steve and the whole, in the stage and the whole team with opinions. And there you have to be harsh.

I wouldn't say harsh, but you have to be very determined. Right. You know, there, there are two real opinion based decisions that happened on the iPhone. One was the keyboard. Should we have a hardware keyboard or should we have a virtual keyboard? The BlackBerry was the number one productivity messaging device of its time. It was called a CrackBerry for a reason, because people loved it, because it had, it was easy to type and you know, they could get their work done. But when you're saying we're going to move from that, everyone's talking about that in the market and you say we're going to move to a virtual keyboard and it's not going to work as well as the hardware keyboard. That's an opinion based decision. Right? Because the data is telling you, yeah, all the best sales are over here.

God, that takes guts.

It takes guts, but you have to look at it from a different point of view. And this is how I learned to come to understand this. Because I had been building, you know, virtual keyboards before and I knew, you know, the goodness and the badness in them. Right. But he was like, look, those are productivity devices. We're making it where ours is born out of an entertainment device and productivity, right. We need to show full screen videos. We are going to have apps, not apps, but our apps, the Apple apps, because there were no app store yet, are going to take over the whole screen. You want a full screen web browser, you don't want one. That's like half of the device is just a keyboard. Maybe you don't need that keyboard in every instance. So we want that part of the screen to change based on the tool you may need at the time. And maybe it's just full view, right? So you have to go and understand it's a different type of device just because that's that and it's successful for that reason. The CrackBerry for the keyboard, that's not the only thing you're going to do with this device because people only did messaging and maybe a few phone calls, right? This was going to be so much more. It was going to be an entertainment web browsing device. So you wanted those tools to go away, but it wouldn't be as good as the hardware keyboard. So that's an opinion. Well, let me give you another opinion based decision that got turned around before it shipped. Steve said, no SIM slot, I don't want any slots. We're going to make it very pure. Johnny was like, of course no slots, Johnny. And we all looked around and go, that doesn't work, you can't do that. Well, why does variety? And then he would always, and this was the magic of Steve, like when you said no, that doesn't work. He'd go, well why does Verizon not have any SIM slots? Right? They showed that you can do a mobile phone with no slim slots and you're like okay, here we go. And so a few days later we come back with, you know, and so product marketing, voice of the customer engineering. We all come back with all the data showing how many, how many data networks and mobile networks required SIM cards versus did not and what the trends were. And we showed the data and that killed the, or, excuse me, brought back the SIM slot on the original iPhone. Because we're like, because he was just like, we're going to tell AT&T to not use a SIM. Yeah, right. We're going to just tell them to do it differently, right? But we were like, if we want this thing to go anywhere around the world, you want to put that friction in, people are going to move from place to place. You know, they have different sims because, because of the prices and all that stuff, we had to show all of that data. And then that opinion based decision got turned into a data driven decision and the SIM slot obviously showed up. So those are two very, at the very same time, right? Opinion can hold and so can data. Overrule opinion when data does exist for a V1.