Happy New Year! I hope it’s going well for you.
Here are two anecdotes and a theme to start your engineering brain in 2024.
Chatting with a Head of Engineering
Late last year, I chatted with a friend who had recently left a job as the Head of Engineering for an ambitious hardware company. They had primarily been a software engineering leader in past jobs and this new challenge had been a big learning curve. I was curious to hear what the biggest surprise or takeaway from the experience was for them.
They mentioned that the main frustrating thing was that their team seemed to be constantly redesigning. They would finish one design concept, put it out into the world, learn a few interesting things about the design or customers, and were forced to go back and change the design based on this learning.
After a year or so of this, the leader became aware that instead of focusing with his team on creating the perfect design for a product, they should instead focus on creating a team that could consistently and quickly iterate upon learning new information or being confronted with new challenges.
Lego Roller Coaster: An Inspiration
A seemingly very different experience left me with the same feeling: watching a YouTube video about someone building a LEGO roller coaster (video linked below if you are interested).
The striking thing about this video is that the roller coaster is built over probably 100 iteration cycles up from the most simple version of the coaster to the excellent finished product seen at the end of the video.
Each cycle is complete, and the author puts the car on the track and tries it out to see how it goes, closing the loop (literally) between theory and reality.
The video couldn’t help but bring me back to memories of the most successful hardware projects I have been a part of. In fact, I would hazard to say that if I were to recommend one resource on engineering for project managers in 2024, it might be this video haha.
Maximize Cycles: An Engineer’s Mantra
Top-down planning is great and should be done, but never survives collision with reality.
Reflecting on both of these experiences, I remember how many times I repeated this during the past year. My engineering mantra for 2023 was clear Maximize Hardware Iteration Cycles.
I probably repeated this 500 times either to myself or to the hardware engineering teams I worked with.
It seems simple to do in theory, but the practice is challenging given the high stakes, the cost associated with hardware builds, and healthy optimism on the part of everyone inside the project.
However, it’s possible to do and I would encourage you to bring some of this idea into your work this year.