Nike FuelBand
On my first day at Nike, Rob (today Nike’s VP of Technology) pulled me aside.
“I want you to become Nike’s expert in BLE.”
I owned how the iPhone talked to FuelBand over Bluetooth — our app, Synapse’s firmware in Seattle, Apple’s radio stack on phones that were sometimes not public yet. I became Nike’s point person for the iOS BLE–firmware SDK with Synapse, spent time at their offices in Seattle and on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, and helped grow Nike’s in-house FuelBand iOS team. Agencies like AKQA stayed on with us, still shipping FuelBand work alongside the in-house team.
Then the FuelBand BLE connection kept bugging out. The iPhone’s battery kept dying far too quickly. We had millions of users and a major release approaching. The usual bug-fixing loop would take days. That wasn’t acceptable. The right people in a room could end it the same day.
It wasn’t a question. I grabbed another engineer, hopped in a car, and was in Seattle just after lunch. We worked the evening against the live bug with Synapse and drove home that night with it verified.
Same instinct later at Apple, with more planning: get in the room and prove it.
“I wear this. It’s a FuelBand. I think Nike did a great job with this. It’s for a specific area. It’s integrated well with iOS.”
— Tim Cook, All Things D (D11), May 2013; as published in Fast Company
Fast Company named Nike the #1 Most Innovative Company of 2013, with FuelBand in the mix. Forbes said Nike — not Apple — had taken the lead in wearables. None of that press names me. It shows the stakes of the product we were on.
Whether or not your app talks to hardware, don’t hire someone who’s fine waiting days for a fix they could land in hours. Hire the person who won’t accept the status quo — who gets the right people in a room and ends the loop.