So now, instead of rummaging through toolboxes and cupboards, trying to find the right tool to pry their weird old thermostat off the wall, customers simply reached into the Nest box and took out exactly what they needed. It turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight.

And then it turned into a lot more than that.

The screwdriver was never just for installation. It had ripple effects all the way up and down the customer journey.

A vital part of the customer experience is post-sale. How do you stay connected to your customer in a way that’s actually useful? How do you keep on delighting people instead of just marketing to them, selling and selling until they’re sick of you?

The Google teams with whom we’d planned to integrate and codevelop technologies and products were reluctant to work with us. They kept asking their execs for more details to figure out if they really had to help us at the expense of their own projects. Why? Why? Why do we have to help a team that isn’t Google? Over the subsequent months, every time we had to clarify yet again for customers that Nest was separate from Google, our internal reputation took another hit.

I should have remembered what it was like at Apple during the very first months when we started building the iPod. It just didn’t occur to me—Nest was so much bigger and more established than my tiny iPod team, I thought this was a completely different situation. But it was exactly the same. Back then Apple’s executive antibodies saw us coming to take their time and draw away their resources, so they tried to block our way and ignore our requests.

That’s when Steve Jobs gave us air cover, dropped bombs on the teams who were slowing us down, forced the issue, yelled sometimes to make sure we got what we needed. Steve Jobs fighting for us was ultimately what allowed us to succeed.

Lövgren asked the foundry managers who’d said they had the problem to invest their cash in the prototype. I confess I was a little nonplussed by this approach: ‘What would you have done if you couldn’t raise the funding?’ I asked when I saw him at a conference we were attending. Lövgren looked at me, rolled his eyes, and said, ‘Then I would have known it wasn’t a big enough problem for them to solve, and I’d have moved on to another business.’ Eventually, the business of making ‘robust robots’ specifically for foundries and other technically challenging environments took off.

Because IKEA’s many policies are different from the norm and because they fit together in a coherent design, IKEA’s system has a chain-link logic. That means that adopting only one of these policies does no good—it adds expense to the competitor’s business without providing any real competition to IKEA.

In a restaurant-smart company, that phone call most likely would never have happened. And if the controller did happen to catch the mistake (if the company had a controller at all!) and reached out to the chef, they’d likely be told to stay in their lane. But overhearing that phone call taught me that someone in corporate wielding that kind of control isn’t always unwelcome. The chef’s bonus was tied to his food costs, and if his numbers were consistently below par, he’d be out of a job. That explained the relief I’d heard in his voice when Hani told him where he’d been bleeding. Our back-office efficiency meant that guy didn’t have to worry about the numbers and could go back to being a chef. We weren’t stealing his creativity; we were returning him to it.