”(…)You don’t need everything in your first product, it’s usually too complicated (…) so you need to make sure that you set those milestones, set those constraints so that you can actually ship… because you must ship. Why must you ship? You must ship because the people on your team need to put something on their resume. They need to that result. What happens if you never ship? Or you never ship something that everyone believes in? They go to their next job and they try to find it and they go what did you do the last two years? Well we kinda f*cked around…”

Tony Fadell is the founder and CEO of Nest Labs, Inc., the company that developed the Nest Learning Thermostat. Prior to Nest, Tony served as senior vice president of Apple’s iPod division, reporting to Steve Jobs. He was responsible for creating the first 18 generations of the iPod digital music player and the first three generations of the iPhone.

This rings quite true when I think about the work I accomplished at Interzone. I think it’s important as a team leader to have results that people can look at and say “yep I did that!”

More info about this presentation here.