The Story Drives the Build

From Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making (Harper Business, 2022). The line opens the excerpt on storytelling that Fast Company ran in May 2022 with the publisher’s permission; the quote is verified against that excerpt, and the print page has not been independently checked. Fadell led the teams that built the iPod and iPhone at Apple, then founded Nest.

Fadell watched the 2007 iPhone keynote from the stands, having heard the speech before. Jobs had been telling a version of that story every day for months during development, to the team, to friends and family, polishing it whenever a listener looked puzzled. “It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built.” When the story failed, the product was what changed: “If part of the story didn’t work, then part of the product wasn’t going to work, either”. That, Fadell says, is ultimately why the iPhone got a glass front face instead of plastic and shipped without a hardware keyboard.

Fadell is explicit that none of this is special to consumer gadgets: the same discipline applies “Even if you sell lubricants to a factory that’s been buying the same thing for twenty years.” Nor is the story the ad campaign. “The story doesn’t just exist to sell your product. It’s there to help you define it, understand it, and understand your customers.”