Elon Musk’s 5-step design process for building virtually anything.
Musk notes that “your requirements are definitely dumb, it does not matter who gave them to you.” You have to ‘question the question’. Musk uses this step to test assumptions, pointing out that requirements from a ‘smart person’ are often the most dangerous since you might not question them enough.
“If you’re not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough.” Musk suggests starting lean and building up when and if required, but warns that the bias will be to add things ‘in case’, “but you can make ‘in case’ arguments for so many things.” He goes further, arguing that each requirement or constraint must be accountable to a person, not a department, because you can ask that person about its relevance and purpose, rather than having a requirement that nobody owns and persists for years despite being redundant.
“Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist,” Musk explains, emphasising the importance of working through the first two steps before trying to optimise. To do this effectively, Musk argues that each engineer needs to take a holistic view of the project, pointing to previous mistakes where engineers had invested enormous resources into reducing the weight of the rocket’s engine but hadn’t adequately addressed the equivalent problem of reducing payload weight.
Musk embraces the drive to go faster but warns against pointing your efforts in the wrong direction, saying “if you’re digging your grave, don’t dig faster.” Only after the first three steps of his process are satisfied to ensure that you’re moving faster in the right direction then accelarate.
Musk warns against automating before the earlier points are addressed. He relates the story of streamlining a robotic process to build battery mats in the Tesla Model 3. He describes investing massive time and effort to automate and streamline that problematic process before he finally asked what the mat was for. He discovered that it had been created to reduce sound but was no longer required.
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