Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Fadell brought us the iPod and then went on to start Nest, and the book is his distillation of decades of building hardware and software products at Apple and beyond. The format is advice-driven — chapters on what to do in your twenties, how to manage, how to deal with lawyers, how to decide when to quit — and the advice is specific because Fadell has done most of it wrong at least once. For product direction it is one of the best books by a product-minded entrepreneur: Fadell thinks about products as physical objects with emotional relationships, which is a discipline that pure-software product people usually lack. Ken Norton calls it one of the essential PM reads; the chapters on storytelling and on the difference between data and opinion are the strongest. Opinionated, practical, honest about failure.