Welcome to the Build Better Handbook – a work in progress documenting all I’ve learned from the leaders I admire, my own experiences, and my observations about developing and producing world-class electronics products from seeing over 100 NPIs. Let’s start from the beginning.
Sam and I outside Instrumental's first office in Palo Alto, 2016
When Samuel Weiss and I founded Instrumental in 2015, we were fresh off of delivering the first Apple Watch to the market and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on our mission to eliminate the massive inefficiencies we'd witnessed in electronics manufacturing. We had a little professional credibility, a bold idea, and a small amount of funding. While we envisioned a more efficient future for manufacturing powered by technology, our mission was more selfish: build the tools we thought we needed to build the best products. Many years later, while the vision and the goal are the same, our mission is broader: to empower engineering and operations teams who manufacture products to do their best work.
At the beginning, I thought the only barriers to building better products were technological. Back in 2015, there was very little on the internet about the lives of hardware engineers, our struggles, and how to excel at our jobs. When we asked engineers and leaders how they learned new best practices or about new technologies, it was generally from peers. So I started toward our mission by writing what I knew about building great electronic products and my vision for what technology, such as manufacturing analytics and automated optical inspection, could unlock. I wrote a simple piece of content in 2015 defining what EVT, DVT, and PVT meant, the first of such content on the internet at the time, and it was a hit. Leaders said they embedded it in their onboarding, training, and company wikis; we have the backlinks to prove it. It seemed like I’d landed on something interesting.
Technology can only improve business outcomes when the culture is aligned with improving business outcomes.
Years later, I have the unique vantage point of seeing inside nearly 100 companies executing over 100 NPI programs and millions of production units -- I realized the challenges aren’t just technical. While the particularities from company to company and program to program are different, the leaders and the cultures they nurture significantly impact product performance. Technology can only improve business outcomes when the culture is aligned with improving business outcomes.
Leaders in manufacturing have apprenticed in the school of hard knocks – it’s a role you learn on the ground, working up from the bottom of the organization. The constant barrage of crises hones their intuition over decades. Manufacturing leaders often operate in large, complex organizations that are siloed, fractured, and generally quite unique to that specific company. That makes writing general leadership guidance for manufacturing leaders nearly impossible.
But leaders want to learn, and they learn best from their peers. We've highlighted leaders with bold ideas on the best ways to lead teams, who think critically about their processes, and with frameworks on crisis response. I regularly speak to leaders who want to learn about everything I’ve seen in the 100s of organizations I've worked with. They want to understand how others are operating, how they stack up, and how they can improve their organization.
That's the purpose of the Build Better Handbook: to provide a place for visionaries and leaders to learn from their peers, to get insights into their organizations and processes, and to provide opportunities to shift their organizational culture towards improved product performance and business outcomes. While Instrumental has roots in consumer electronics, we’ve broadened our focus to include electronics manufacturing across the volume, quality, and regulatory spectrum. We’ve divided the content by product lifecycle stage, each with sub-chapters on leadership lessons and tactics and “screws and glue” content from our archives for daily operators.
We’ve also learned that many visionaries and leaders in engineering and operations struggle to bring new technologies into their organizations. We’ve learned a lot about how to successfully do that through the years – working with visionaries who were subsequently promoted or otherwise recognized within their organization – so the Handbook has a section dedicated to evaluating and adopting innovative products, whether Instrumental or something else.
We’re excited to work on this with you! Drop me a line if you have feedback or are interested in contributing your own school of hard knocks knowledge to the Handbook.
Anna-Katrina Shedletsky
Engineer | CEO and cofounder of Instrumental