Engineering by Management

Designing anything is hard, even if it’s just an update to something that already exists. Sometimes that’s even harder than starting from scratch, because preserving the good and fixing the bad is not always as straightforward as it sounds. Sometimes you sell the bug as an added feature, like in the above meme.

It also doesn’t help when management or—shudder—marketing is the originator of the product concept to begin with. Let me give you some examples I have personally encountered.

One company had a product that sold well, that the customers liked, and had a reliable service record. But for some reason management decided it needed an overhaul to make it look and feel more high tech, more modern. Perhaps it was feedback from the customers, or maybe our competitor had something that looked cooler. However, by the time it reached the design engineers, there were already red flags.

First, management wanted us to use components that were expensive, rare, and in some cases custom. Even before the pandemic, this created a supply chain issue. Second, they designed the case before designing the internal components. Seriously, we hadn’t designed any of the circuit cards, but they sent around six designs for the cover to get our opinion on which looked best. Having to fit everything inside a certain form factor is not terribly uncommon (think about all the smart phones), but usually the internals are at least somewhat known. We hadn’t even built a prototype to verify that all the features would work, much less how much room we might need to put it all together. Will it surprise you to learn that we could not get all the bells and whistles to work together? Yes, it turns out that electricity is not a limitless commodity, much to the surprise of people who do not understand electricity beyond whether something needs batteries or can be plugged in.

Our designers worked through all of that, managed to make something that worked, met the key needs of the product, and was ready for a prototype build at the manufacturer. Which is where we discovered that putting the thing together was going to require special tools and processes, and that the end result would be a product that could not be repaired if something went wrong during the build. Which also meant that if it failed in the field, we could not refurbish what the customer returned to us.

If that sounds bad, it was. A key engineer was given an award, a raise, and a bonus, and still ended up so burned out he left the company. I’m not sure they ever got the product that management dreamed up.

And if management comes up with bad ideas that engineers do their damnedest to turn into reality, marketing is even worse. Another company I worked for spent a year working on a new product, but there were problems with the prototype. The most obvious was an overheating problem, more than just something that could made into a hand warming feature. It got hot enough to burn an operator, and to cause the electronics to shut down, both of which needed to be addressed. We had a big meeting of all the engineering teams involved, and after figuring out a solution for the overheating issue, we started talking about the manufacturing process. I asked what I thought was a reasonable question: what are the specifications? Or in other words, how do we verify that it does what we want it to do? The response, from the marketing guy who had gotten the whole project started, said, “It has to be faster than the competitor’s product.” I asked how fast that was, and he pulled out the marketing sheet for the competitor. Which said that theirs was the fastest on the market using lots of phrases like “up to” and “as much as”, but very few specifics. I think my boss did an actual facepalm at that point.

Leave your stories of clueless management asking for the impossible in the comments. I know every engineer has one.