Shipulski On Design

Archive for September, 2026

When you see others get promoted, what do you do?  Do you beat yourself up because you didn’t get promoted?  Are you happy for them?  A little of both?

When someone you worked with for a long time gets a wonderful new role outside the company, what do you do? Do you hold onto the fact that things will be harder for you because they won’t be there for you?  Do you worry about the organizational gap that you’ll be asked to fill? Do you actively celebrate their good fortune and praise them to the sky?

When you work with someone for a long time, you build trust.  And trust allows you to have difficult conversations.  You can talk about the real deal.  You can discuss situations that have strong emotional energy. You can get to the real root cause, however inconvenient.  You can share your fears and struggles.  You can support each other in bad times and celebrate success in good times.  When you have trust, it’s less lonely for both of you.

When the person you work with for a long time is a pro, they teach you because you are willing to learn from them.  And you teach them because they’re willing to learn from you.  They elevate their pro-ness, and so do you.  Sure, it feels good to both of you, but it also feels good to the broader organization.

When you work with someone for a long time, you invest in each other.  You don’t keep score; you simply invest.  They need some investment, and you give it freely.  And when they need some investment, you don’t hesitate.  You grow from the giving as much as the receiving.  This respectful give-and-take ratchets up performance on both sides of the interaction.

I think working with someone for a long time creates immense value.  However, I think it’s difficult to measure and takes time to develop and yield fruit.  I don’t think companies can effectively calculate the return on investment of its people working together for a long time, but that’s okay.  There is great personal value that comes from working with someone for a long time. And I think that’s reason enough to find someone to invest in for the long haul.

Image credit — Veit (Can I trust you?)

With companies, there are always competing demands and too few resources.  Always.  Don’t feel special. And there is always noise in the signals.  Always.  And it always comes down to a single question:

What do we do next?

Don’t believe me? Think about your meetings last week.  During the meetings, there was discussion about the current situation followed by discussion on what to do next.  And at the end of the meetings, there were lists of things to do next.  Those things may not get done, but there were lists of things to do next.

The competing demands create the set of possible problems to address.  And the problems are inputs to the critical decision: What do we do next?  The demands are not fully defined, which adds noise to the decision process, and there is no agreement on the underlying problem, if the problem is formulated at all.  This adds noise to the signal.  There are more demands/problems than resources, and they compete with each other for the small pool of unallocated resources and the sea of double-booked resources.  This creates emotional stress and also adds noise to the signal.

Situation Normal for all companies: Partially formed (competing) demands, disagreement on the relative priority of the ill-formed demands, incomplete (or missing) problem formulation, limited understanding of the required resources other than everyone knows there are more demands/problems than resources, and immense pressure to violate resource constraints.

I cannot give you a recipe to answer the all-important question (What do we do next?), but I can suggest ways to reduce the noise and better assess the options.

Spend some time formally fleshing out the demands before the meeting.  Dig in.  Bring data.  What is the output required? Who is asking for it? What are the inputs? What happens if we do it?  What happens if we don’t?  Come to the meeting with your analysis, but call it “a draft”.  Let others ask questions and challenge your assumptions.  Don’t be defensive.  They are not attacking you; they are trying to improve understanding to make a better decision.

The cost of making a bad decision is immense, so it makes sense to spend a lot of time preparing a good description/assessment.  The cost of over-preparing is low, so over-prepare.  Here’s a rule:

For big decisions, preparation time should be at least ten times longer than your first estimate.

Another type of assessment is often overlooked.  It’s the assessment of how well the opportunity fits with what you do well, with how you do things, and with the dispositional state of the larger system.  In short, you’re trying to answer: Is it easy?

Here are some things to consider to answer the “Is it easy?” question.  If the opportunity requires new knowledge, skills, and abilities, it will not be easy. If it requires you to work in different ways with new partners, it will not be easy.  If it cuts against an industry trend, it won’t be easy.  This is not an exhaustive list, and you should come up with your own assessment themes.  To be clear, though, these lines of assessment are different than “How many people do we need?”

Here’s a rule:

You can’t run a marathon wearing running shoes that are three sizes too small.

There is nothing wrong with having too many good opportunities and too many competing demands.  In fact, I think that’s a good sign.  I think it says you are in high demand.  And there is nothing wrong with having too few resources because, again, it means you’re in high demand.  I’ve never met a profitable company that had too few opportunities and too many resources.

Image credit — Mitchell Hirsch

See something TO say something.

Say something TO do something.

Gotta get it right TO gotta give it a try.

Progress BEFORE perfection.

I failed TO I learned.

Can’t be done TO here’s how.

It might not work TO I’ll do it anyway.

Progress AT THE EXPENSE OF perfection.

Me TO we.

My way or the highway TO what do you think?

Why BEFORE what.

This will be difficult AND we’ll do it together.

Them TO us.

Condemnation TO best intention.

Don’t do that TO why not try this?

This is what I expect BEFORE this is not good.

You messed up TO how can I help?

What BEFORE how.

Do this TO what should we do?

Finish BEFORE starting.

Quiet criticism TO public praise.

Image credit — Fraser Mummery

Process, process, process.  Everything has been about process improvement over the last decade.  And Lean has had a good run.  But let’s face it.  Its improvements have diminished, and it has largely hit a wall.  And yet, we are doubling down on this tired old horse.

S-curves are real.  Improvements are slow in the early stages, steep in mid-life, and they roll off as the system hits its asymptotic constraint.  And that’s where Lean is now.  It has hit its physical constraints defined by the product design.  Yes, I said the product is the constraint.  And without a radical change to the product, the next level of process improvement is blocked from coming to be.  But it’s not as bad as it seems.  In a sense, the bad news is the good news.

Over the last couple of decades, we forgot that the total cost is largely defined by the product design, not the manufacturing process.  The design engineering community has been let off the hook and has not been tasked with designing the product with less material cost or designing it in a way that opens up space for the next generation of process simplification (Lean).  The bad news is the product design has not changed and is blocking the next evolution of Lean.  The good news is that because the product design hasn’t changed, it’s ripe for radical cost reduction.  And the better news – changing the product itself can reduce material cost, and the material cost is at least 75% of the total cost.  And, by definition, Lean, in its current and future embodiments, cannot reduce material cost. The only way to reduce material cost is to change the product design.

Lean has saved money, but because it cannot make changes to the product itself, it can only reduce labor cost.  Here’s the math.  If material cost is 75% of total cost, overhead is 5%, and labor cost is 20%, the domain of Lean’s savings has always been limited to about 20% of total cost.  (There has never been a project that successfully reduced overhead, so that’s always off limits.) When the product itself becomes open to change, the potential for cost reduction is almost four times larger (20% to 70%).  And that’s the good news.  But the good news is also the bad news.

Yes, if the design can be changed, cost savings can be astronomical.  But the bad news – there are no engineering leaders who know how to do it.  And without engineering leaders advocating for, cajoling, prodding, and teaching product simplification, the engineering team cannot and will not pull it off.

The tools for product simplification exist, but the appreciation for their power has aged out with the previous generation of engineering leaders.  And the knowledge of how to wield the tools has also aged out.

If you want to open up the next level of company profitability, you’ve got to simplify the product.  Full stop.  And if you want to achieve those 4X savings, you’ve got to hire an old pro who has done it before.  Yes, I said old. (Maybe “experienced” is a better word?)

And before you get the bad idea to research the history of product simplification and the associated tools in the hopes of doing it on your own, don’t.  More than anything, this journey is an emotional journey.  You have to create the right conditions for the engineers to succeed, and that knowledge is not captured in the history books.

If you want to succeed, you’ll have to hire an old pro.  This is The Way.

Image credit — Crosa