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    A place for visionaries to learn from their peers about getting culture right, NPI, Production, and evaluating new technologies

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Build Better Handbook: Table of Contents
  •   

    Start Here

    • Introduction to the Build Better Handbook

    • Manufacturing Term Glossary

  •   

    Getting Culture Right

    • Jeff Lutz: Team Culture Drives Product Performancepopular

    • Scrappy Ways to Execute Like Applepopular

    • Building a Culture of Quality

      • Building the World's Most Reliable Products: Insights from Medical and Defense Leaders
      • Fear Management
  •   

    NPI: A How To Guide for Engineers & Their Leaders

    • Leading from the Front

      • Marcel Tremblay: The Olympic Mindset & Engineering Leadershippopular
      • Anurag Gupta: Framework to Accelerate NPI
      • Kyle Wiens on Why Design Repairability is Good for Business
      • Nathan Ackerman on NPI: Do The Hard Thing First
      • JDM Operational Excellence in NPI
    • Building the Team

      • Quality is Set in Development & Maintained in Production
      • 3 Lessons from Tesla’s Former NPI Leader
      • Maik Duwensee: The Future of Hardware Integrity & Reliability
      • Reject Fake NPI Schedules to Ship on Time
      • Leadership Guidance for Failure to Meet Exit Criteria
    • Screws & Glue: Getting Stuff Done

      • Choosing the best CAD software for product design
      • Screws vs Glues in Design, Assembly, & Repair
      • Best Practices for Glue in Electronics
      • A Practical Guide to Magnets
      • Inspection 101: Measurements
      • A Primer on Color Matching
      • OK2Fly Checklists
      • Developing Your Reliability Test Suite
      • Guide to DOEs (Design of Experiments)
      • Ten Chinese phrases for your next build
    • NPI Processes & Workflows

      • EVT, DVT, PVT Stage Gate Definitions
      • Hardware Schedules are Driven by Iteration
      • The Shedletsky Test: 12 Requirements for NPI Programs
      • 4 Best Practices for Generational Knowledge Building
  •   

    Production: A Primer for Operations, Quality, & Their Leaders

    • Leading for Scale

      • Navigating Factory Moves and Scaling Production in an Era of Uncertainty with PRG's Wayne Miller
      • Steven Nickel on How Google Designs for Repair
      • Petcube’s Alex Neskin Embraces Imperfection to Deliver Innovation
      • Proven Strategies for Collaborating with Contract Manufacturers
      • Greg Reichow’s Manufacturing Process Performance Quadrants
      • 8D Problem Solving: Sam Bowen Describes the Power of Stopping
      • Cut Costs by Getting Your Engineers in the Field
      • Garrett Bastable on Building Your Own Factory
      • Oracle Supply Chain Leader Mitigates Risk with Better Relationships
      • Brendan Green on Working with Manufacturers
      • Surviving Disaster: A Lesson in Quality from Marcy Alstott
    • Ship It!

      • Serialization for Electronics Manufacturing
      • Tactics to Derisk Ramp
      • E-Commerce Ratings Make Product Quality a Competitive Edge
    • Production Processes & Workflows

      • Failure Analysis Methods for Product Design Engineers: Finding Sources of Error
      • Failure Analysis Methods for Product Design Engineers: Tools and Techniques
      • How to Improve First Pass Yield with Instrumental
      • How to Identify Dark Yield
      • JDM Operational Excellence in Production
  •   

    Thinking Ahead: How to Evaluate New Technologies

    • How to Buy Software (for Hardware Leaders who Usually Don’t)

    • Adopting AI in the Aerospace and Defense Electronics Space

    • Build vs Buy: A Guide to Implementing Smart Manufacturing Technology

    • Leonel Leal on How Engineers Should Frame a Business Case for Innovation

    • Saw through the Buzzwords

      • Managed Cloud vs Self-Hosted Cloud vs On-Premises for Manufacturing Data
      • AOI, Smart AOI, & Beyond: Keyence vs Cognex vs Instrumentalpopular
      • Visual Inspection AI: AWS Lookout, Landing AI, & Instrumental
      • Manual Inspection vs. AI Inspection with Instrumentalpopular
      • Electronics Assembly Automation Tipping Points
      • CTO of ASUS: Systems Integrators for Manufacturing Automation Don't Scale
    • ROI-Driven Business Cases & Realized Value

      • Building a Buying Committee
      • How to Buy Software (for Those Who Usually Don't)
  •   

    Webinars and Live Event Recordings

    • Get Me Outta Here! Racing to Full Production Somewhere Else

    • Tariff Talk for Electronics Brands: Policies Reactions, Reciprocal Tariffs, and more.

    • Materials Planning: The Hidden Challenges of Factory Transitions

    • Build Better 2024 Sessions On Demand

      • Superpowers for Engineers: Leveraging AI to Accelerate NPI | Build Better 2024
      • The Motorola Way, the Apple Way, and the Next Way | Build Better 2024
      • The Future of Functional Test: Fast, Scalable, Simple | Build Better 2024
      • Build Better 2024 Keynote | The Next Way
      • Principles for a Modern Manufacturing Technology Stack for Defense | Build Better 2024
      • What's Next for America's Critical Supply Chains | Build Better 2024
      • Innovating in Refurbishment, Repair, and Remanufacturing | Build Better 2024
      • Leading from the Front: The Missing Chapter for Hardware Executives | Build Better 2024
      • The Next Way for Reducing NPI Cycles | Build Better 2024
    • The State of Hardware 2025: 1,000 Engineers on Trends, Challenges, and Toolsets | Build Better 2024

      • Scaling Manufacturing: How Zero-to-One Lessons Unlock New Opportunities in Existing Operations | Build Better 2024
    • Build Better Fireside Chats

      • Aerospace and Defense: Headwinds & Tailwinds for Electronics Manufacturing in 2025
      • From Counterfeits to Sanctions: Securing Your Supply Chain in an Era of Conflict
      • Design for Instrumental - Simple Design Ideas for Engineers to Get the Most from AI in NPI
      • Webinar | Shining Light on the Shadow Factory
      • Tactics in Failure Analysis : A fireside chat with Dr. Steven Murray
    • Preparing for Tariffs in 2025: Resources for Electronics Manufacturers

      • How to Prepare for Tariffs in 2025: Leaders Share Lessons and Strategies
      • Tariff Talk for Electronics Brands
      • Talking Trade Compliance with Gabrielle Griffith
      • GUIDE: Moving Your Factory
  1. Build Better Handbook
  2. NPI: A How To Guide for Engineers & Their Leaders
  3. Leadership Guidance for Failure to Meet Exit Criteria

Leadership Guidance for Failure to Meet Exit Criteria

Estimated reading time: · copy link

Item #3 of the Shedletsky Test is: Do your builds have explicit entry and exit criteria — and if a build does not meet exit criteria, do you repeat it? Minus one point if you have ever done an XVT.

Here's how to ensure you have a solid NPI process around build entry and exit criteria and what to do when they aren't met.

Star Wars meme: So we don't meet our EVT exit criteria

Entry & exit criteria for NPI builds

As you make your NPI schedule, you must define your entry and exit criteria for each stage. Our article on hardware stage gates provides some guidelines to get you started.

The NPI process aims to ship a high-quality product to your customers at the volumes and yields you expect. To determine what needs to be achieved in a given development build, work backwards from the exit criteria for maturity. Here are some very common high-level development build goals:

  1. EVT: Looks-like and works-like. Success is a locked design for a hard tool release.
  2. DVT: One line running production-capable parts and processes at mass production speeds and yields. Success is one final production configuration and one "golden line."
  3. PVT: Validation of sustained yields at volume with line replication (if applicable).

At the end of each build, ask:

  1. Did this build enable us to achieve both the product maturity we expect and the data we need to complete the next build stage successfully?
  2. Did we collect the data required to give the team confidence that they will be successful in the next build?
  3. Rather than moving on to the next build, should we spend additional effort getting more data?

Reliability results, functional test yields, cosmetic yields, functional validation, user feedback, and FCC or other regulatory certification will also influence product maturity and confidence in success. Frameworks like digital twin engineering and manufacturing traceability, especially when combined with a visual inspection system, bolster your ability to collect data and manage your build process.

When you don’t meet your build criteria: avoid temptation

At the end of a build, engineering leaders should be especially vigilant for updates that sound like this: “We had some troubles, but the team is confident we can make it up in the next build,” or “Let’s have the next build be an XVT, and we’ll decide afterward if we’ve caught up or not.” As a leader, you may feel compelled to suggest the same.

As a leader, however, not meeting your build criteria presents a significant test of your leadership. Your decisions at this juncture could make you a hero or a failure; they could enable the company to hit its organizational goals or cease to exist (if you are a startup). You will need to be very thoughtful about your next steps.

If you have not met the exit criteria, you must insert a new build into the schedule to try again. Hopefully, you weren't already operating with a fake or overly optimistic schedule, and have some buffer built in. In the worst case, you will have to delay.

Temptation 1: Beware the overly optimistic, fake schedule

This situation breeds the dreaded fake schedule: an unreasonably optimistic schedule that most engineers will privately acknowledge is not plausible. A fake schedule damages the product and hurts the team beyond creating schedule delays. Hundreds of micro-decisions are made each day, and if everyone is marching to a fake schedule, your team will be forced to make trade-offs they could have avoided if the schedule was realistic.

If you’re an engineer: Be honest with yourself, your teammates, and your executives. Does anyone on the team feel their component is at risk? Resist the temptation to call out an individual or group. Act on the issue as a team and present it to your leadership as a team. If a new schedule is needed for some extra validation work, DOEs, or another tooling spin, be frank about the need.

If you’re an executive: Your team is doing their best to deliver — but make sure their good intentions haven’t led them astray. Poke at the upcoming build schedule to ensure it’s not a fake by digging into the remaining engineering risks, lead times, and build planning. Resist the temptation to try to “fix it” by optimizing the schedule to the hour, which sends the wrong message to the team. Don’t get upset about not meeting the original plan. Your team may feel like they are risking themselves professionally to tell you the truth, so create an environment where everyone works through schedule issues together.

Temptation 2: Continuous building or XVT

I implore leaders considering continuous builds: it's not worth it, you do not get to the finish line faster.

Another temptation in this situation is to throw out the concept of a staged build event and instead build any new revisions of parts as they are available: the dreaded “continuous build.” Perhaps more common at larger companies, continuous builds are financially expensive and tiring for the team. Without an end, there’s no pause to evaluate whether success has been achieved. The team is focused on kicking off new parts instead of evaluating the whole. The configurations built are often not fully validated and can create overconfidence in a solution going into the next build stage. Continuous builds need to be staffed — not only with engineers from your team, but engineers from the factory side who could be doing other things to improve the product maturity, like reliability testing, failure analysis, and design or process changes. Intense travel and weeks of juggling both their factory job and their responsibilities at headquarters will have a major impact on your team's productivity. As someone who has lived the continuous build as an engineer, I implore leaders in this situation: it's not worth it; you do not get to the finish line faster.

The longer path may be a shortcut

Temporarily meeting metrics to go from "all green" to "all red" overnight is bad for your reputation as a leader and erodes trust with your team and peers. When contemplating the longer path, which may be a delay to the original schedule, stick to a guiding principle: if the product and customer experience will be at risk, then take the hit now. A good product is the best outcome.

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