High Output Research and Development - Dave Litwiller - Oct. 18, 2017
1. HIGH OUTPUT R&D
Catapulting Your R&D Organization to the Top Echelon of
Productivity and Strategic Impact
OCT. 18, 2017
DAVE LITWILLER
Notice: All images, designs and trademarks are the property of their respective owners
2. R&D PRODUCTIVITY
NEEDS TO RISE
• KW R&D labour costs are roughly half of those in Si-Valley
(salary, benefits, equity)
• Lower relative staff turnover rates make the costs here even
more attractive
• The word is out now:
• The nearly risk free R&D talent arbitrage is getting more
competitive
• Wages are escalating well beyond inflationary rates
• I believe we are at the front end of a secular trend that will
likely last for years
• We need to assume that KW R&D will need to get much more
productive over the years ahead to remain as competitive as
the region is today
• => The stakes are rising to improve R&D management skill,
tools and training
3. PRODUCTIVITY IMPACT
OF HIGH OUTPUT R&D
PRACTICES
Empirical spread from good to great R&D performance
among head-to-head competitors in a sector:
Technology Sector R&D Productivity
Spread
Software 2* to 3*
Biotech 3* to 5*
Tightly Coupled Multi-Disciplinary 4* to 10*
Parts of the reasons for such a wide spread intra-sector:
• The best don’t just work faster, they learn faster with each
project, getting better at an increasing rate vs. competitors
• The best don’t decide between having the product good or
having it fast; good and fast are part of the same
4. KEY QUESTIONS
• What accounts for the most productive R&D enterprises at
the scale-up stage?
• What role do culture, leadership and organizational design
play?
• How should the current health of a R&D team and
structure be evaluated?
• What are the highest leverage improvements which can be
made over the short, medium and long term?
6. GO FOR BROKE
CULTURE
• Individual high energy and group electricity
• People testing their personal limits
• Obsession, tempered by well grounded technical reason
• Intersection of personal and group goals
• Objective performance measured against global best
• Widespread fervency
• There are few morale problems, usually none; people are
buoyed by the work
• Creativity
• Inside the box for the fundamentals
• Outside the box selectively for breakthroughs in performance,
reliability and simplicity
• Design duality: For each difficult design issue, simultaneous
drive to remove a performance constraint while increasing
reliability
7. GO FOR BROKE
CULTURE
• Competitive
• Internal: Burning desire to show who can be the best and
work the fastest with quality to earn the esteem of the
strongest peers
• People who relish being the underdog, showing they can
beat the better known and better resourced
• External:
• Will to win
• Failure is the enemy
• Clear threat, to catalyze action and overcome resistance
• Simultaneously with these competitive forces, a passionate
belief that success will bring to the world something that
will make it a better place
8. GO FOR BROKE
CULTURE
• Confidence
• Good:
• Optimism, grounded in technical and market analytical
reality
• Attract strong peers and partners to join the effort
• Positive that solutions to difficult challenges will be found
• Bad:
• Hubris, either unfounded or carried over from an
increasingly irrelevant past
• Dismissive of inconvenient but objective technical and
marketplace facts
• Loss of ability to self-criticize, or to act on self-criticism
9. GO FOR BROKE
CULTURE
• BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goal
• Only way to attract and retain the best people over time
• Only way to get true sign-up is if the prize professionally
and personally is worth the sacrifice
• Must be matched with plausibility that the goal can be
achieved
• Complimented with reflexive, fast iteration, mutation and
small-step adaptation
• Technology
• Products
• Processes
• Deciding what not to do any longer, at about the same rate
as deciding what new things to do
10. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• Individuals pushing themselves and each other for more,
better, faster
• People revel in the talent of others, and not overtly fear it
• They see a priceless opportunity to learn, to see how good
they can be, and practice in their disciplines to make a big
impact
• New arrivers feel the tension to perform, pushing much
harder than they would were they left to their own devices
• There’s a stream of institutional conviction that pulls
newcomers in to a higher sustained pace of progress and
expectation for contribution and success
• There is a palpable tension that no one wants to be the
person who delivered his or her piece of the puzzle late,
holding back the rest of the team
• >10% of R&D staff self-motivated to work to extreme
time/hour levels
11. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• There is excitement about the rate at which concrete progress is
being made, and the efficiency by which people are achieving it
when working all out
• This becomes a kind of narcotic the high performers cite as part of
their fuel which drives the R&D effort further forward
• Camaraderie of a like minded drive for success; spontaneous pulling
together to achieve common ends
• As well, there’s camaraderie at home for what the R&D team
members are doing at work, for them to sustain a high level of
dedication
• Collegiality that layers on top of pulsing intra-team competition and
thirst for progress just below the surface
• Yin-Yang of speed of execution and frugality
• The reputation for unmatched speed and scope of progress becomes
the magnet for further inbound top tier R&D talent, no longer as
much the legacy reputations of the people already on board
12. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• Individual success is seen through the lens of commercial
success in products and services
• Not: Cool engineering for its own sake, instant gratification,
science in the name of science, or patents as the primary
trophies
• Product reliability and quality advances are seen as being
equally valuable as raw functionality advances; reliability
and quality are not step-children
• People are judged by the quality of their work and ability to
meet integrated schedules, not by personality, title or rank
• Superstars pulled in from the more individualistic and
exploratory world of academia get quickly in sync with
team-based activities and the need to work well with other
disciplines toward focused objectives and deliverables
13. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• People jump toward fixing problems, both within their
function, and cross-functionally, to make the whole company
and customers successful
• Decisions and issue ownership assignments are made
quickly, not languishing or bouncing around the organization
looking for a home
• There is a web of voluntary, mutual responsibility
• There is shared optimism, despite personal differences, that
collective dedication, intelligence and expertise will prevail to
overcome all problems
• Optimism is self-fulfilling just as is pessimism
• There is mutual respect within the team for the talents of
others, and that respect is objectively well deserved, not just
a social nicety
14. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• Information sharing
• The only real social obligation apart from advancing the work
• Underpins trust, morale, communication, and keeping
talented, ambitious people working together
• To keep credibility high, information must be well curated,
articulately written or spoken, and edited
• Related:
• There needs to be comparable disclosure of positive as failed
results
• Otherwise, information, learning, and intellectual rigor gets
lost, capacity for error correction deteriorates, the openness
intrinsic to high performance culture erodes, and avoidable
risk creeps into R&D
• Movement and exchange of people is intrinsic to ongoing high
fidelity, low latency information exchange
15. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• The right people are in the right jobs (as obvious as this
sounds)
• People recruit people stronger than themselves
• Managers develop management and leadership in others
• Regular pruning and reseeding of the misfit
• There are no self-anointed experts
• The day you become one, you cease to be one; stasis sets
in
• Knowledge is perishable; excellence has to be constantly
renewed
• If self-satisfaction can happen to an individual, it can
happen to a team, and the company
16. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• There is coherent and useful localization of company
vision and mission
• Little Balkanization of mission and vision
• People are able to reach clear yesses, noes, and not leave
too many dangling maybees
• The difference between the rhetoric and polled reality of
mission and values is nearly zero
17. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• Bootleg engineering is in evidence
• People are so impassioned about the technical and market
opportunity to want to push the boundaries on their own time
• Empirically, there is a high correlation between project quality
and investment of personal time
• Bootlegging is a critical link between conformity and
surreptitious journey to greater independence and boundary
pushing as technical staff seasons
• Added benefit: Projects done outside the lines tend to be
carried out hyper efficiently, and killed off quickly if an
insurmountable infeasibility is reached
• Leaders curate excellent ideas bubbling up from within
• Not: Late stage leadership efforts to level-up underwhelming
ideas
18. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• Leaders only have to intervene after senior staff and
middle managers have solved most of the difficult
problems
• Attention to detail is a given
• Within technical sections, functions, across functions, and
over time
• A distinctive dialect is present
• Unique to the project or company, evidence of highly
compressed, efficient communication and tribal gelling
• Not just a mosaic of current buzz words or sycophancy
19. CULTURAL
DIAGNOSTIC
• The last three promotions were all people who are
exemplars of the mission, values and desired model of
execution
• Especially elevations to the most senior positions
• Related Diagnostic Trait: Open rebellion by team against
any mediocrity in management
• The orthodoxies that all strong cultures develop and come
to cherish remain in step with competitive reality
20. INTERNAL
COMPETITION
• Internal competition needs to reflect the competitive
intensity of the external environment
• As companies mature, the right kinds of internal
competition are strong antidotes to tunnel vision and
bureaucracy
21. INTERNAL
COMPETITION
• Spectrum:
• Us vs. x, x=the problem to be solved, giants of the past, failure…
• Us vs. the competition, where derision or indifference of competitors
toward the insurgent is taken as a call to arms
• Team desire to be the best; us bettering ourselves of yesterday
• Sub-team desire to be the best, ratcheting others forward
• Multiple critical design study teams
• Competitive internal development teams, and engineering audits of
projects in difficulty
• Competing lines of business or business units
• Internal marketplace for ideas and resources; intense advocacy from
individual R&D staff at all levels to get their most promising
observations and ideas acted upon
• Staff and management role ambiguity (intentionally)
22. RECONCILING INTERNAL
COMPETITION
• When competition is necessarily such a strong part of
high output R&D organizations, much effort needs to be
put into keeping competitive forces from turning overly
inward and becoming harmful
• Using organizationally designed intra-company
competition is premature if the company has not yet
developed the ability to work out its big brawls of identity,
strategy and priorities
• Otherwise, the big brawl just tends to atomize to smaller
interconnected brawls played out in localized competitive
efforts
23. RECONCILING INTERNAL
COMPETITION
• Diagnostics for whether internal competition is tipping
over to destructive levels:
• If information hoarding or other resource hoarding is
reaching unhealthy extremes
• If agreements are being brokered between competing
people or teams for détente, to not push each other so
hard or be as critical
• If collaborating 3rd parties or departments outside of R&D
can’t figure out which competing R&D team or faction to
back, and thus hold back or slow down their work
24. RECONCILING INTERNAL
COMPETITION
• Stronger: Designed co-operation
• Setting up sub-team mutual co-dependency for certain
ongoing tools, work items, measurements and data
• Forces people to regulate their behavior toward
collaboration, rather than overly individualistic pursuits
• Softer:
• Information sharing (i.e. open seminars), credit sharing,
award sharing, co-authorship on published papers
• Pre-loading commitment to future collaboration after initial
period of competition
25. EXTERNAL
COMPETITION
• Even for newer R&D staff who do not yet have a complete
sense of the market, every design engineer needs to know:
• Where his or her product stands relative to the external
competition
• Quality
• Performance
• Reliability
• Market share
• COGS
• Trends for above
• R&D productivity vs. competition and reference class
benchmarks for products under development
• Time to market
• Time to volume
• Providing this frame of reference reinforces commercial
success as the primary determinant of technical merit
26. LEADERSHIP
• Deeply technical
• Remarkable command at a fundamental level of the underlying
science and technology
• Only way to deal with fast changing, complex technology
• Key to positive leadership rather than passive reviewer-ship
• Management systems, tools, leadership techniques, organization,
processes and culture are not a replacement for technical depth and a
high rate of technical learning
• Ultimate source of foresight, veracity of aims and potency of ambitions
• => Committee Abdication: Non-technical leaders in R&D nearly
always failover to management by consensus, with all of its attendant
group decision problems in slow speed and bias
• => Insufficiently technical leaders in R&D often delegate decisions to
more junior technical staff and managers, and then never fully own the
outcome
• Sees implications of new technologies before most others do
• Considers possibilities that do not occur to ordinary scientists,
mathematicians and engineers
27. LEADERSHIP
• Deeply technical (cont’d)
• Strong, pragmatic sense of future customer needs
• Maximum speed through OODA loop, to compete on time
• Speed can only come from a deep intuitive understanding of a
rapidly changing environment
• Orientation is the most difficult part of OODA to achieve
• Not easily placated with blithe assurances about design and
technical issues
• Rare ability to identify what is essential in an intricate
problem, and interpret what it means
• Is everywhere as the battle is raging
• Real-time sense of the ebb and flow; otherwise responses
and decisions are too slow
28. LEADERSHIP
• As good at analyzing human problems as technical ones
• Both individual and relationships
• Tends to know what everyone is doing, all the time, with a
sincere and personal interest
29. LEADERSHIP
• Pushes team hard, pushes self harder
• Takes the problem to heart
• Deeply competitive w/ outside world
• Self-reliant, demanding the same of others
• Leads from the front
30. LEADERSHIP
• Socratic
• Able to stimulate and challenge; asks good questions
• Able to ask the right question at the right time
• The right question can change the frame of reference of
what is being observed or hypothesized, to lead to more
productive avenues of resolution
• Emphasis is on the unknown and the undecided
• Truth and reality are the supreme criteria
• Highly interactive
31. LEADERSHIP
• Paradox of sustaining great collaboration
• Able to make good decisions on the spot, but not in an
arbitrary way
• Decisions are made without unduly curtailing the autonomy
of individual contributors
• Willing to hear others out with an open mind, even if they
have to be overruled, in order to maintain their ongoing
commitment
32. LEADERSHIP
• Deep generalists, not narrow specialists
• Able to see connections, interesting problems, solutions
through multiple disciplines, and multiple frames of reference
• Do not just fixate on one design parameter to the exclusion or
detriment of others; able to compromise but with high
standards
• Able to see merit of nonconventional approaches more than
narrow specialists
• Read and network extensively, outside field as well as within
• Masters of back-of-the-envelope analyses
• Usually brilliant at mathematical shortcuts and estimations to
make fast, useful estimates and check likely veracity of longer
form calculations and models
33. LEADERSHIP
• Knows when to get original data and analyses
• Rather than rely on prevailing wisdom and tiring anecdotes
• Students of history
• Autodidactic
• Avail themselves not just the most recent or available
example, to maintain perspective
• Technical judgement to steer through areas far beyond those
previously known
• Able to fit new pieces into the puzzle very quickly
• Moreover, most great R&D programs require at least one
significant contrarian bet against the prevailing view
34. LEADERSHIP
• Has insight into how to achieve resiliency in projects and
products
• Able to overcome unforeseen circumstances, without
blowing time, cost or technical budgets
• Counters performance or schedule limiting component
bottlenecks by returning to the most basic forms of how to
alter the physical phenomena at issue, and then builds
back up to feasible alternatives
• Distinguishes between excellence and perfection
• Able to let team members hear the siren call of perfection,
while driving toward timely delivery
35. LEADERSHIP
• Has confidence of group that the leader knows True North
• Able to handle multiple peak performers and their inevitable clashes
• Tends to have:
• A keen sense for identifying the truly important problems, and the
essence of how those problems impact the development and the
organization
• A very good memory
• Ability to see the limit of any particular experiment or technique, and
to see around the next bend to know what should likely be tried next
• A cool head under pressure, to stay focused on the real problem
• An inclination to tackle problems as they arise, not procrastinate; at
the same time having optimism that solutions will be found down the
line to problems which can’t be solved immediately
36. LEADERSHIP
• Has Integrity
• Intellectual and personal integrity is the basis of technical
excellence and sustainable outperformance in challenging
R&D
• Wants to make sure that unwelcome truths are heard and
acted upon
• The term “hacker” may be worn as a kind of badge of honour
in certain kinds of less technically demanding efforts
• The great leaders of complex technology developments are
never hackers
• They may be great improvisers, and usually are, but always
have a deep appreciation for how abbreviations, changes and
workarounds will respond under all of the usage pressures
the system will face
37. LEADERSHIP
• High quality network
• Drives talent pipeline and quality; a gravitational centre to
entice others to share the dream
• Sign: Inner circle of elite in the industry
• Calibrated ability to evaluate talent
• Deep understanding based on internal and external
benchmarks of what constitutes great, good, and
insufficient talent, looking far beyond superficial personality
factors
38. TEAMS
The Catalytic Power of One
• Each subsystem where breakthrough performance is
required necessarily must have one person who is:
• Obsessed with the challenge; sees self in a competitive
race and with something big to prove
• Energetic and relentless; nearly inexhaustible; thrives on
pressure and deadlines, will not wilt
• Overpowering curiosity to want to know the answer, quickly
• At the forefront of the required skills and knowledge
• Views success in this specific pursuit as career defining;
usually views it as powerful tool to change the world
39. TEAMS
One Person (cont’d)
• Willing to forsake nearly all else in work-life to quickly
succeed in the face of many obstacles
• Exacting and disciplined experimentalist, guarding against
the negative potentialities of bias and hubris that often
come along with big intellects and big egos
• Knows how to get just enough data from an experiment or
trial to inform the next wave of work, not over-specifying
data requirements from any one effort
• Desire to know everything; engulfed in all facets of the
problem
• Able to keep an open mind to alternate possibilities, even
when most signs are convergent
40. TEAMS
One Person (cont’d)
• As adept at designing and improvising tools and
scaffolding as devising the core technology or product
• Hands-on
• Feels responsibility for technology from lab to field;
lifecycle owner, not just the front end of R&D
• ~0.5% of all R&D staff have this disposition and capacity
• The Greyhound: The most durable form of performance
pacesetting vs. managerially injected carrots, sticks and
exhortation (many of which have declining or negative
effectivity with long-term use)
41. TEAMS
• The Power of Seven
• Optimal team size for a system or subsystem development
as measured by productivity, speed and quality
• Large enough to cross-pollenate capabilities, and allow for
division of responsibility to match individual aptitudes and
skills
• Small enough to minimize mistaken assumptions and bad
hand-offs, which delay work and compromise quality
• Also, there’s nowhere for low effort or weak skills to hide
• Able to talk quickly to solve difficulties fast vs. larger teams
• Bounded team limit provides an antidote to “biggerism”
both in the product and the enterprise, the flawed belief
that the solution to the problems of big is to get bigger
42. TEAMS
• Activating the Power of Seven
• Target having aggregate ability within group to both know
when and how to
• Do it quick with more bold assumptions, vs. when to go
slower and more methodically
• Have disciplined back-up plans should inspired leaps fail
• The best path to a sustained presence in the fecund
middle ground
43. TEAMS
• Activating the Power of Seven (cont’d)
• Aim to have everyone be better than the others at one
important thing, but pretty good at almost everything
• Every person needs to move the team’s discussion and
deliberation forward in his or her own way
• If some of the personalities on the team are prickly, also
have at least one person who is a social lubricator, who
keeps everyone talking to prevent friction overheating
44. TEAMS
• The Limit of 50
• Fifty is about the largest technical project team size that has
historically achieved breakthrough performance, across ICT,
aerospace and biotech
• Beyond fifty people in a R&D team
• The law of averages and reversion to mean performance
become much more common
• Individual responsibility and impact diffuses
• An increasing proportion of total effort goes into co-ordination
and work about work, rather than the technical work itself
• The size of just the council of sub-team leaders tends to go
well beyond seven
• A quantum leap in formal structure becomes necessary
delineating between what is centralized and what is
decentralized
• In general, incremental advances can be sustained with larger
teams; breakthroughs though become rare
45. TEAMS
• The Limit of 50
• Loosely coupled technologies and incremental advance
projects are more forgiving for larger team sizes
• Tightly coupled systems and breakthrough technical
performance projects are less forgiving, with the complex
and multidisciplinary nature of constituent technology
interactions and design change propagation
46. TEAMS
• Viciously limit team size to achieve high productivity
• The highest output teams are 1/10 to ¼ the size of their
standard productivity peers
• Small team size is both a cause and effect of high
performing individuals, supervisors, methods and tools
• Small teams force people to self-select who thrive on
seeing themselves as responsible for the outcome, rather
than expecting a lot of support
47. TEAMS
• Viciously limit team size to achieve high productivity
• Maximum output and quality requires a single person as
the combined chief engineer, product manager, and
program manager for a major development program
• Single head to achieve maximum alignment, agility and
speed
• Full responsibility for technical, financial and operational
performance of product and program
• The alternative of fan-out of individual roles at the top
propagates multiplication throughout team, with
compounding co-ordination, communication, accountability
and rate of learning overheads
• Additional split program leadership issue: Lowest common
denominator of work ethic among leaders tends to become
adopted by the whole team over time
48. TEAMS
• Implications
• Level-up first by building depth and breadth within
individuals, not bloating teams as the primary path to skill
expansion
• Tool: If teams are too large, analyze what would be
required to cut team size in half while maintaining output
• A factor of two reduction is usually enough of a reduction
for the thought experiment to get at limiting assumptions to
generate useful change
49. TECHNICAL TRAINING
• Necessary to build distinctiveness of culture and sense of being part
of something special around elite technical excellence and agility
• Continuing technical education
• 5-7 p.m., one night per week, with tests
• Builds connections across technology disciplines
• Refreshes currency of core knowledge
• Provides basis for greater individual and sub-group autonomy over
time, to scale
• Lunch and learn for briefer or less formal matters
• Regular discussions about peoples’ interesting finds in the technical
literature as a capturing, filtering and dissemination mechanism
• To drive learning in fast
• Say one, do one, teach one
50. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Advantage: Little reprogramming difficulty
• Starting points:
• Test Engineering:
• Appreciate how to abstract to the minimum effective test,
while not losing critical behavioural information – onramp
to great design sense
• Develop a first hand sense of how costly late stage design
changes can be to budget and schedule, when major
issues surface in integration and system test
• Destigmatize test engineering, counteracting a common
tendency in the R&D pecking order that test is a lesser
pursuit than design engineering
• To do test engineering well, it is not any less
intellectually or technically challenging than design
51. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Test Engineering (cont’d):
• Superior capability in test (and debugging) is intrinsic to
proficiency in design
• Premature or overdone division of work between
design and test corrodes productivity
• Significant competitive advantage flows to those who
can figure out how to test in hours or minutes what
takes others days or weeks
• Alternative: Develop a test rig and testing protocol to
reveal critical design information which is currently absent
52. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Starting points:
• Field Engineering:
• Incorporate rigors and complexities of field success into
early design knowledge
• Counterbalance the relative linearity and controlled
nature of the internal development environment
• Send the signal both out and in that the company stands
behind its product
• Develop early, lasting sense of the voice of the customer
• Best are tough, but technically astute customers
• Additional benefit: Learn the art of shaping customer
expectations, not merely reacting to them
• Development specs can guide incremental
developments; breakthroughs though require a strong
sense of the customer
53. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Starting points:
• Field Engineering (cont’d):
• Learn how to push the envelope of the existing system
designs, as the basis for more insightful future component
and system engineering work
• Successful products breed additional requirements
• See who has the attitude and aptitude to hit the books or
find expertise to learn about the technologies that are not
part of their background to date, to identify who can grow
into broader system engineering roles over time
• Provide sense of how to reduce required change in
customers’ adjacent technologies and workflows to
expedite adoption of new technology
54. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Starting points:
• Design Engineering:
• Compiling and synthesizing engineering data into concise
technology reports, building basis for management of
technology over time and proper technical information
sharing
• Such technical communication training shapes
perspective of what is relevant, self-development
vectors, and development of others
• Preparing critiques of competitive products or projects
• Code reviews and design reviews, conducted alongside
strong system-level reviewers to build system sense
• Troubleshooting existing systems, building ability to think
about unexpected, complex issues quickly and well
55. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Starting Points:
• Production Engineering
• Learn how product really gets built and tested
• Appreciate any differences between the development and
production environments
• Learn how to quickly design custom production and test
equipment, building improvisation and instrumentation
engineering wherewithal
• Learn how to develop and refine production processes
• Form a personal network of contacts in production with
whom to discuss future production-related product design
issues
56. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Daily review of design work
• Illuminate unexamined assumptions
• Impart the right ideas about design quality and expedite
the journey up the judgment learning curve
• Quickly identify further individual and systemic training
improvements
• Challenging first assignment
• Build in the right work habits right away
• See who has the mettle to be a strong contributor on a
strong team for mutual benefit
57. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Above all: Make sure young R&D staff come early on to
appreciate the high cost of excess complexity and
specious design assumptions in design, test, production,
maintainability of design and the field
• It is easy to design something complicated; it is hard to
design something simple
• Simplicity is usually the only path to reliability
58. ONBOARDING YOUNG
R&D STAFF
• Match staff strength with supervisory strength
• Put the highest potential outperformers under the supervision
of the most capable senior engineers
• Have design staff be present for their designs’ early
demonstrations and trials with prospects and customers
• Provide first hand feedback from paying users about design
fitness
• Explain the central importance of patenting
• As well, describe the process for invention disclosure, vetting
and patent application
• You don’t want to lose in the courtroom what you’ve hard won
in the marketplace as time goes on
59. ORGANIZATIONAL
SKILL EVOLUTION
• Visualization Tool:
• Map of:
• Current organizational technical skills and activities
• Current industry technical skills and activities
• Future industry
• Future org
• Gap and differentiation analysis
• Importance of looking ahead one to three years:
• As business grows, rapid shifts in skill mix become more
difficult to achieve
• Ingrained biases
• Absolute volume of new hires and training required to
shift balance
61. BOTTOM-UP VS. TOP-
DOWN DESIGN
• Top-down prevalent in engineering and computer science
education today
• Computing and simulation centric, allows rapid iteration,
feedback, and learning in a single domain or narrow range
of domains
• Assumes and encourages loose coupling of components,
ample design margin at interfaces, and relatively stability
of those interfaces as components evolve
• Most applicable in many digital hardware and software
environments
62. BOTTOM-UP VS. TOP-
DOWN DESIGN
• Bottom-up has become a somewhat forgotten art in some
engineering fields
• Bottom-up is required when components and subsystems
must be operated near their maxima, with little design
margin, tight coupling and change propagation, and
especially with cross-disciplinary integration
• Typically, reliability, cost and space demands require that
each component perform a multitude of functions
• Bottom-up is most applicable in biotech, aerospace,
semiconductor processes, materials science and intensely
space, power or unit cost constrained ICT products
63. BOTTOM-UP VS. TOP-
DOWN DESIGN
• For highest productivity, the training, tools, and
management methods change considerably between top-
down and bottom-up engineering
• R&D organizational dynamics follow subject system
development dynamics; form follows function
64. BOTTOM-UP VS. TOP-
DOWN DESIGN
• R&D Organizations Oriented for Top-down Design
• Easier to add individual contributors quickly working on the
core IP base
• New arrivers only need to understand part of the system
• The effects of change from mistakes or inappropriate
assumptions are easier to isolate and fix
• Short training cycles to reach productivity
• Less technical supervision required
• Limits:
• System performance = Sum of parts
• Complexity explosion at top of organization and system under
development if not done right
• Unexpected surprises of tight coupling can require extensive
system redesign if any one component has to change
65. BOTTOM-UP VS. TOP-
DOWN DESIGN
• R&D Organizations Oriented for Bottom-up Design
• Longer learning curve to appreciate and respect the cross-functional
implications of design choices; more methodical technical training req’d
• The essential R&D skills are to anticipate the unknown, plan for the
unforeseen, and to bring together many areas which had formerly been of
ignorance or only partially understood
• More intensive, active and cross-functional technical supervision is
needed
• The magic is in the relationships between components, and the ability of
components and subsystems to do double and triple duty contributing to
overall system requirements
• This is the path to design elegance and resiliency
• There are mirror issues for people
• Upside: System performance can be >> sum of parts with emergent
properties and advantageous sub-system interactions, better
compressibility of functionality, and easier scaling complexity
• Typically: There are opportunities for much stronger IP protection
potential because of cross-functional and multi-functional insights
66. BOTTOM-UP VS. TOP-
DOWN
• Tightly integrated, bottom-up developments:
• The guiding technical expert is the project manager
• The leader cross-pollenates insights and new findings among
sub-teams and individual contributors
• Daily R&D contact with manufacturing and field
• T-shaped training for technical staff, between two and ten
related functional disciplines typically
• Personnel need to be comfortable in an environment where
individual responsibility and formal authority are not fully
matched
• Fluid communication, co-location and personnel exchange
between component design, sub-system, system, test groups
and production engineering
• Elevated importance of continuity of core team members
• Increased importance for a regular flow of new product
development, not boom-bust cycles with long fallow periods
67. SET-BASED
ENGINEERING
• People consider several design alternatives during the early stages of
development
• Start a bit slower, to finish much faster
• Forces the issue of being able to do rapid design studies, developing
deep technical domain expertise
• Keeps options and minds open longer than with early lock-in on a single
preferred solution, providing better adaptability to downstream internal
and external design changes
• Expands scope of solutions with possibilities for combined techniques
• Provides warm alternatives if leading solution turns out to have greater
difficulties as development progresses than were anticipated
• Challenge
• In the rush to get going, people can want to select a presumed winning
approach too early
• This often turns out to be a case of being penny wise but pound foolish
for time to market schedule impact, overall development cost and product
fitness
68. SET-BASED
ENGINEERING
• Heuristic
• 5-6 initial plausible concepts for rapid design studies
• 2-3 for comprehensive analysis
• 1-2 for full development implementation
• Scenarios
• Lower budget: Red and Blue team task forces to
competitively evaluate top two design alternatives at least
to the critical design stage
• Where schedule trumps budget: If there is a choice
between two methods, one of which is good and the other
looks promising, then build both
69. TECHNICAL
MERITOCRACY
• Expect and demand that everyone, regardless of age or
seniority, be able to argue his or her point on technical
grounds
• Win or lose, everyone takes satisfaction in having been
heard, the opportunity to argue directly for what (s)he feels
is right, and having received serious attention
• Drives out technically lax or superficial thinking
• Reinforces sense of individual accountability and owning
the outcome
• Without technical merit as the overriding determinant,
many more error prone subjective and changing decision
influences inevitably take over
70. TECHNICAL
MERITOCRACY
• Instill that the ability to do breakthrough design comes
down to being able to see both bottom-up and top-down
alternatives to traditional architectures which break
through prevailing performance and cost limits
• A very good starting point is deep understanding of the
elemental and integrated limits of current technology
• Any tolerance for superficial understanding of prevailing
design challenges is a formula for mediocrity in R&D
productivity
• The only way to come up with novel solutions is to ask the
most fundamental questions and then answer them in new
ways
71. PROJECT MANAGERS
• Complete responsibility for a project has to be given to a person, not
an organization
• Introducing project managers as a matrix overlaying functional
departments is always a risk if it diffuses responsibility for project
delivery from technical managers who control resources and
resource development
• The more complex the technology, the more novel the system, and
the faster the development program, the more technical the project
manager needs to be
• Heuristic: At least as technical as a senior design engineer
• There is really no other way to infuse an attitude of self-reliance,
responsibility and technically astute risk taking
• Non- or weakly technical administrators as project managers
increase information processing batch sizes and introduce waiting
72. PROJECT MANAGERS
• Administrative project managers are only suitable
• In projects where extensive bulldogging of low tech
contractors or customer deployment resources is required,
and,
• In technically light application layer software development
with a lot of flexibility between scope and schedule
73. PROJECT MANAGERS
• In development projects of greater technical depth and
complexity, project managers need to be as technically
aware, inquisitive and insightful as engineering managers
• As previously described, they often should be one and the
same, not split roles, especially in the highest speed and
complexity developments
• Project manager authority should flow exclusively from
technical capability and breadth
• If project managers are used separately from functional
leaders, good ones provide full redundancy of technical
oversight with engineering managers to make sure that
important issues get identified early and acted upon
74. PROJECT MANAGERS
• If they’re used as separate entities from technical
leadership, the focus should be on continuity, integration,
and re-integration of technical and market information
transfer as development moves phases from R to D to E to
Production to Field to augment the formal reporting
structure
• Project managers should not be used for resource
prioritization or the mainline of personnel evaluation
75. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Documentary project management tools are at best a
support, and never a replacement for, informed, attentive
technical project leadership
• Ignore any reverent buzzwords of project management tools
or models in vogue at any moment as elixirs
• Ongoing face-to-face technical interaction and ownership is
the mainstay of managing complex R&D programs well
• R&D projects that fall behind, stay behind
• Schedule recovery is a rarity after early phase delays
• Infuse the team with the necessity of hitting the early internal
milestones at full scope as vigorously as the more externally
visible late-stage milestones
• Marching army costs usually predominate total development
cost. The leading way to control development cost is to hit
the schedule
76. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Everything possible shall be done to save time
• Time is the ultimate perishable commodity
• Re-use existing technologies to the greatest extent possible
• Outset thought experiment: Imagine the development
program is in schedule or cost overrun delivery danger late in
development because of each component
• Would you be willing to substitute a readily available
alternative component, at least as a bridge solution, to get to
market?
• Notional Limit:
• 30% to 40% new technology in each generational advance of
the overall system for tightly coupled technologies
• Higher is possible for loosely coupled
77. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Red-Yellow-Green Task Status Dashboards
• Only let yellow be used to mark transitions from G ↔ R for
one week max on individual work items
• Forces action to recover, or acknowledge late
• Otherwise, ambiguity takes over, first with tasks, then the
program
78. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Co-locate development and production
• This alone is usually worth a ~25% increase in R&D
productivity in time to volume
• Goal: Initial conception to pilot production in one place
• Echo effects for the supply chain and field issues engineering
• Engineers never lose responsibility for their designs, they
keep learning how to make their designs and production
better
• Always have back-up plans for any schedule limiting
component or sub-system
• Delays in delivery of a critical path item usually relax the
tempo of the entire development
• Reigniting tempo is much harder than keeping it up
continuously
79. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Rule: Any cause for delay that becomes probable has to
be immediately reported to the chief engineer in writing by
the person anticipating the delay
• Have a fast, transparent change management process
• Relatively easy to do in loosely coupled, top-down systems
• More challenging in tightly coupled, bottom-up systems
• Change propagation matrix or network visualization tools
help avoid simple cognitive errors
• War room change implication stand-up meetings, up to 3*
daily at highest tempo
80. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Condition development teams to present options to
recover from setbacks requiring escalation for decisions
in terms of both cost and time
• What is the option that may cost more, but recovers time
that would likely otherwise be lost?
• What option keeps costs in check, but may take more
time?
• Instills dual wherewithal in speed and technical dexterity
• Kill problems, don’t just wound them
• Otherwise, they tend to come out of remission at
inopportune moments with amplified impact to speed and
quality of R&D
81. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• The engineer who screwed up reports the screw up to the chief
engineer first
• Quid pro quo is that the chief engineer will provide a first level heat
shield for those who come clean quickly
• Estimate work down to ½ day increments for each contributor
• Doing so tends to make sure that all work makes it onto the WBS,
avoiding dark work that otherwise can unexpectedly surface later in
the development project wreaking technical and program havoc
• Fine grained effort estimation errors tend to cancel whereas coarser
estimation errors tend to have similar over- or under-estimation bias,
with errors cumulating adversely
• Peer and supervisor review effort estimates to get better at this
quickly
82. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Pull the development team’s leadership together at 10%
increments through the development program
• Conduct overall reviews of design trade-offs, key
learnings, propagation of change, assumptions, trends,
and inferences
• Necessary to make sure that blind spots aren’t building up
in the daily maw of tactical design decisions
83. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT TOOLS
• Get an early grip of the time acceleration factors that will
be used during the test phases of the development
• Much time goes by during test and a lot of cost accrues
• Late performance or reliability surprises are much costlier
to fix than if they can be revealed earlier
• Send out daily, detailed results reports during integration
and system test
• Make sure everyone involved in the design knows exactly
where things are at as issues emerge during test
84. COMPUTER MODELS
AND SIMULATION
• Appropriate Use
• During detailed design after the basic concept has been
properly defined and critical design issues fully understood
based on fundamental understanding
• Risk from Premature Use
• The emotional suasion of the appearance of predictive
information access, control, and intuitively appealing
graphics
• Obfuscation of incomplete or flawed critical issue
understanding
85. COMPUTER MODELS
AND SIMULATION
• Sign of constructive use
• First pass results within 10% of up-front back-of-envelope estimates,
and ultimate implementation
• Monte Carlo multi-variate analyses in tightly coupled systems
• First time close, if not first time right
• Problem diagnostic
• If R&D staff don’t understand they underlying subject matter well
enough to do back-of-envelope analysis to the above accuracy, and
if implementation results are further off
• If people leave out important variables, with technically lackluster
explanations about the reasons why
• If issues and their efficient resolution need to move fluidly across
technology domains
• In these cases, simulation-centric iteration will usually only achieve
sub-standard local optimization, often slowly
86. TOOLS AND
SCAFFOLDING
• Sustainably leading enterprises
• Typically need to invest in at least one capital intensive
area of infrastructure, which most competitors choose not
to, which gives the winner deeper technical insight into a
core performance issue, or the ability to iterate and
optimize much faster than peers
• Me-too infrastructure risk
• Makes it much harder to achieve and sustain
outperforming R&D productivity over time
87. TOOLS AND
SCAFFOLDING
• To avoid support infrastructure costs without sufficient
offsetting productivity:
• Match the investment plan to a productivity plan for
infrastructure utilization
• Best: Competitively measurable speed and utilization rate
impact, to drive out inefficiency
• Build a shared understanding of how high impact and
effectiveness will be measured, evaluated and course
corrected
• Typical winning candidates:
• Tools that allow rapid trials at the frontier where incumbent
and competitive efforts stalled out trying to achieve further
progress
88. MODEL SYSTEMS
• Most high output R&D programs force the model systems
for early test to conform considerably to the usage
demands of the final operational systems
• This is relatively simple to achieve in loosely coupled
systems
• It is more difficult in tightly coupled work, but more
impactful to schedule and cost because of the intensity of
interrelationships
• Requires deep technical insight that there are no big
unknown unknowns to make this bet pay off
89. MODEL SYSTEMS
• With more contrived test of the system or major portions
thereof, the full operational demands of making advanced
technology perform at scale often get concealed until
much later, slowing overall development
• If high technical uncertainty requires simplified model
systems, it is usually best to focus on deep component
and sub-system performance understanding, to build up
to larger system understanding
90. DOCUMENTATION
• A Design Objectives and Criteria manual should be
updated at the beginning of each major development
project
• The design manual details how the R&D team plans to
meet every performance, reliability and regulatory
requirement
• The document becomes a compendium of design
expertise, and a how-to manual for creating a world
beating product
91. DOCUMENTATION
• Value drivers from documenting design objectives and criteria
• #1: Experience needs to be written down, studied, codified,
and taught to become an institutional asset
• #2: Writing and documenting activates different mental
processes for designers than tactical on-the-fly design and
development, to improve design quality at the source; the
benefit is for the writer as much as the reader
• In the mindset of The Medium is the Message
• The design manual should not merely be a scattering of
missives of varying quality on a number of electronic work
surfaces and internal collaboration tools
• To drive design quality, the design manual should be an
edited, carefully prepared document for the future team,
signed by its sections’ authors and editors, and dated
92. DOCUMENTATION
• If very high risk technology is on the critical path of near
term product development, de-burden the entire
development beyond the up front design manual from
more rigorous upstream documentation
• Instead, document very thoroughly and precisely on a fast
following basis upon achieving success
93. SUPPLIERS
• Use of outsourcing for significant developmental
technologies requires more, not less, management
attention than internal efforts
• Training, tools and methods vary too much between
organizations for many routine decisions to be made on
autopilot, as they often would in a vertically integrated
organization
• Almost everything to be decided during subcontracted
development at a supplier needs to be handled as an
exception
• Staffing and infrastructure economies can be realized from
the use of good suppliers for contracted development, but
not management
94. SUPPLIERS
• To keep up R&D productivity with a significant supply chain
doing commissioned R&D, expect to have to develop
comparable subsystem and component expertise in design,
development and manufacturing as exists in suppliers
• The only way to make the right deals is with enough technical
wherewithal
• You build a more competitive and efficient market for the
inputs you need with more technically skilled and business
savvy view of what is being supplied;
• Otherwise, over- or under-valuation of skills and assets can
occur
• Technical expertise in supplier oversight is the only way to
achieve delegation without abdication, to be able to provide
both help and credible threat of lifting work out to another
vendor do police performance and timelines
95. SUPPLIERS
• Assume: Each major supplier will experience one major
crisis where their technological understanding will prove
insufficient to overcome a deficiency in a timely fashion.
• Build sufficient domain expertise to be able to rapidly help
fill the deficit
• Trade-off to Accept:
• Pride, technical orientation and intellectual commitments
can create bias among those overseeing suppliers, but,
bias is less risky than ignorance
• In-depth understanding only comes from hands-on
experience and fundamental technical training
96. SUPPLIERS
• Fewer, deeper supplier relationships will usually work
better than a large number of shallow relationships, for a
tightly coupled system technology
• Loosely coupled technologies are more forgiving for wide
but shallow supplier connections
97. SUPPLIERS
• Resident engineers, or rotating on-site engineers
• Frequent visits are not enough; on-site is insight
• Being present is the only way to really get to know the people,
particularly the key scientists, engineers and managers
• Avoids talking at rather than talking with supplier staff and
management when trouble arises
• However, guard against embedded staff at suppliers going
native, or being too empathetic
• Instill urgency to get answers fast, not to let questions or
doubts languish
• Reporting should be of how things really are, not glossing
over difficulties or failures
• The trick is to be able to guide suppliers technically with
suggestions and criticism, without usurping the supplier’s
responsibility by issuing direct orders about how they should
do their work (except in extreme cases)
98. SUPPLIERS
• Require direct access to all internal supplier reports of
deficiencies
• Keep the focus during times of difficulty on the technical
requirements and issues, and minimize the role of
personalities
• Define a technically centred issue communication and
resolution protocol, such as the A3 report
• Review supplier performance regularly with each vendor
• Quarterly at a minimum, and monthly or even weekly
during the highest velocity co-development programs
99. QUICK TESTS OF HIGH
R&D PRODUCTIVITY
• Can we plan and complete two weeks of work, to full scope and
functionality, with an overall R&D productivity that is at least as good by
$ and time on calendar as competitors and benchmark companies?
• An R&D organization will never be better over long time frames than over
short time frames
• The two week completion test is easy to gauge quickly
• The discipline in the face of shortfalls is to dispel belief of quick fixes over
intermediate time horizons, without persuasive corrective efforts
• Are the most capable people matched up with the most important and
resource intensive projects?
• There are power law dynamics on both sides
• The productivity impact of matching is dramatic
• Mismatches can accumulate quickly in a high speed environment with
cascading series of tactical reallocations
• This mapping exercise needs to be redone every ~three months in
growth-stage technology enterprises
100. QUICK TESTS OF HIGH
R&D PRODUCTIVITY
• The work is the only item of primary importance
• All other organizational issues and symbols are secondary
• The work is deeply personal for people as evidenced by
actions over time, not just words over the short term
• Cynicism and burnout are low, even though the tempo is high
• People are able to act on their perceptions quickly, reinforcing
the institutional ability to think quickly and well
• All contributors individually know and can articulate a similar
sense about
• 1) The sacrosanct, small overriding set of system technical
success factors, and,
• 2) The cost of delay
101. QUICK TESTS OF HIGH
R&D PRODUCTIVITY
• Unproven but critical theories get put to test quickly
• There is a high level of imagination and resolve to build
the diagnostic tools that can’t be readily and cost
effectively sourced
• Best sign: Devising and using several complementary
diagnostic tools to corroborate results from any one
102. QUICK TESTS OF HIGH
R&D PRODUCTIVITY
• Development program documentation is clear, concise,
consolidated, and accurate
• Crisp technical, financial and operational documentation is
not a sufficient condition for R&D success, but it is a
necessary condition
• Troubleshooters go to the source to get the most accurate
data
• There’s a lot of energetic, face-to-face discussion
• Both within R&D, and at the interface between R&D and
the rest of the enterprise
103. QUICK TESTS OF HIGH
R&D PRODUCTIVITY
• Danger signs at the highest tempo and risk phases of
R&D, with susceptibility often highest late in a major
development program
• If improvisation is becoming confused
• If superficial reasoning is being used to silence thoughtful
alternative views
• If performance demands are being shed from the more
understood to less understood parts of the system
• If people become lax when something first shows signs of
working, rather than being wary of further challenges likely
lurking
104. CARDINAL METRICS
Story/Feature Point
Development in Software and
Network Services
Platform
Hardware and
Embedded
Systems
High SKU Count
Completion rate w/ full
functionality
Market Share Trailing 6Q new product sales
Bounce backs COGS Trailing 6Q new product gross margin
High severity production/field
issues
DiP # products to first prototype
Issue resolution times and
reopens
Time to Market Time to first prototype
Design in Progress (DiP, akin to
WiP)
Customer trial/sample conversion rate
Time to Market # Products released
Design iterations per product
DiP
Time to Market
105. SUMMARY
• Highly productive R&D organizations have intense
cultures built around technical depth, ongoing learning,
strong supervision and high stakes commercial success
as the ultimate arbiter of merit
• Individual high energy, creativity and intense pride are
table stakes
• Failure is anathema to the individuals and team;
dedication to success is extreme
106. SUMMARY
• Competition is the engine of progress, but it needs to be
channeled through various mechanisms for sustained
best advantage
• Small teams of high performers vastly outperform large
teams of average performers
• The most productive form of R&D organization varies
widely and follows the character and function of the
technology being developed
107. SUMMARY
• The more complex and interrelated the technology, the
more that R&D productivity comes down to high velocity
management of risk, integration and learning
• The top-down R&D management practices which serve
many ICT efforts need to adapt considerably to match the
needs of more integrated and tightly interrelated
technologies
• The biggest successes are always attributable to scientific
ingenuity, technical proficiency, and relentless drive
108. UPCOMING SEMINARS
Nov. 22, 2017
• Middle Management Development:
• Building the engine of management and leadership
development within the rapid growth technology business
