Innovative System Reliability for Innovative Technologies
Your Best Practice to Solve Hard Problems Better and Faster
How Much Does Loosing a Day (or Months) Cost Your Startup?
What is the opportunity cost? Are incumbents working on something similar? Is there a seemingly unrelated technology that could make yours obsolete? Could a lesser solution that gets market traction sooner use those funds to iterate past you?​Are delays caused by the challenge of hiring the right people as fast as you would like? ​Are problems getting solved too slowly?Are people doing quick and dirty solutions now that will lead to larger issues later? ​All of the above?
Does this look like your organization?
Your product is unique, your market is challenging, and your greatest competition may be the status quo. In order to make a complex product you either need to buy or make everything it needs. Even the parts you buy need people to figure out the best way to assemble them and interface with everything.
The small team that proved the concept needs to grow to a large cross functional team to bring to market
4 Engineering Team Challenges
a Tech Startup Must Overcome to Scale
1. The team that invented your technology are similar and worked closely for a long time. To scale you need many other skill sets and people from other disciplines, industries, and ​companies. Those have different cultures, practices, terminology, and assumptions that add friction even when things are going smoothly.
2. Many best practices, such as lean, have been made almost ceremonial in the largest legacy companies. They do them in a time consuming, burocratic way that don't get the benefits intended. Many startups feel it is best to skip them and miss the benefits.
3. Startups lack much of the infrastructure that evolved within large companies. Growing this from nothing is time consuming, but a copy and paste from your legacy companies miss the opportunity to do better and make the most of being modern and nimble.
4. Keeping leadership informed and other documentation is a challenge. You don't want everyone to write a white paper about every problem, and no one has time to read them anyway. But email chains, and random quick updates are hard convey the scale of issues and are hard to refer back to later when needed.
Your Best Practice to Solve Hard Problems Better and Faster
Have you used or seen problem solving methods such as
Ishikawa diagrams (Also called 5Ms, Fishbone, Cause and Effects Analysis) or Six Sigma DMAIC?
Most likely so have most or all of the engineering leaders, engineers, and others in your company.
I have used and seen others use these and more. As far as I can tell there is no best practice problem solving method. It's more about the people using it and how well they work together.
However having everyone using random different methods to solve problems as a team is not as effective as everyone using one. Having many formats for reports to leadership is also not ideal.
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Your experience is unique and so is your team and your solution. You are growing it at a unique time in history. What if there was a straightforward way to get everyone on the same page? Perhaps your company needs it's own unique best practice right now to solve your problems better and faster?
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to See How it Works
Before Deciding If This Will Work For You
Provided by Jay Lewis
Ideal Frontiers Founder
Over 20 years of experience bringing complex technology products from concept to full production. Have worked with software engineers, operations managers, systems engineers, hardware engineers, manufacturing engineers, data scientists, program managing, and startup investing. Industries include space, aviation, vehicles, medical devices and alternative energy.
My goal is to provide this to 22 high tech manufacturing startups. That's 66 problems solved with 22 similar methods by over 500 of the smartest people in a variety of situations. I'll owe you a summary that honors everyone's NDAs.