Jeff Lutz has done it all: he’s been a VP of NPI, VP of Supply Chain, and a Chief Quality Officer. He was at Motorola Mobility for much of his career, where Six Sigma and the canonical phased gate process such as EVT, DVT, PVT that much of the hardware industry uses originated. Jeff led manufacturing engineering on the series of original RAZR products – designing how mobile devices are made in the factory and building prototypes in Illinois before ramping it up in Asia. He also led Motorola teams through the smartphone years, ramping the first Android hardware platform to scale, executing at the highest levels of efficient NPI and production. These days, he’s one of the most sought-after executive advisors in the consumer electronics world. There’s just no one like Jeff Lutz.
This article is packed with Jeff’s valuable tidbits:
How to align on goals from the organization level all of the way down – starting with yourself
The benefits of flat organizations on team culture and performance
Toxic behaviors and mitigations leaders can take
Alignment of Goals from the Top Down
Given Jeff’s teams worked at the interface of engineering and production efforts, he’s in a unique position to understand the tension and motivations of each side. He believes that unified goals and alignment of their importance across the leadership team are the only way to meet the cost target and maintain quality while delivering on time and at scale. In consumer electronics, the goals are typically divided up where engineering leadership owns being on time, operations leadership owns scale and cost, and quality leadership owns quality. But staying in those boxes won’t result in a high-performing team or a great product. “As a leader, I would lock arms with my peer VPs,” Jeff says. They would develop and agree on interconnected goals. We would push our teams to surface issues and work together to remove roadblocks. If leadership is aligned, then this interlock can be disseminated down the chain. “It needs to be clear in all cross-functional meetings – that we have to balance all four requirements: on time, at scale, and meeting cost and quality targets.” It’s not operations versus engineering because when only one wins, everyone fails.
It’s not operations versus engineering because when only one wins, everyone fails.
This balance is what Jeff calls “offset goals”: no one goal stands on its own – it always needs an offset or counter-balance. In manufacturing, all goals are in tension. For example, a process engineer has been given the goal to cut headcount – but without an offset goal like “while reducing field returns” – that process engineer may cut test coverage to meet their goal while spiking field returns. “I can get anyone to strip out test coverage. High-quality work is figuring out simplification that enables the reduction while maintaining 100% functional coverage.”
To evaluate yourself, Jeff suggests assessing your own goals. They should be simple – three or four only – in tension with each other and aligned with the company's vision. Perhaps it includes volume attainment, ramping on time, out-of-box quality, and the one-year reliability rate in the field. Your goals should be progressively tougher with each new product generation because if you’re not getting better, the competition surely will. If you’re in engineering, in addition to improving product functionality and engineering, you should be thinking about how engineering can support a more generationally efficient supply chain. This is how you keep your goals in tension. You should openly share your goals with your peers and team.
To evaluate whether tensioned goals are fully cascaded down through the hundreds of people on your teams, Jeff’s tip is to start with your leaders. “Dig down with your managers into a few individual contributors on their teams – what are their goals?” Are they singularly tasked, or do they have an appropriate offset goal to balance them?
Flat Organizations Enable High-Performing Teams
You were present. You stayed until the work was done and set an example for the team.
“It was a very flat organization,” Jeff starts. The organization originally had seven or eight layers between an SVP and individual contributors, and leadership focused on getting it down to just five or fewer. The flatness of the organization made it easier to disseminate goals and information, made it easier for executives to be aware of the details and to lead from the front, and ultimately enabled Motorola’s “whatever it takes” culture. When a product was ramping, it didn’t matter if you were a VP, you were in the lab or on the line. “You were present. You stayed until the work was done and set an example for the team.”
Jeff loved it. His team was incredibly efficient and contained some of the originalists of the mobile phone industry. He drove the team to think about how they could simplify things – and rewarded those who rooted out duplicative efforts. He challenges his team to improve every generation, both in the product and execution. He calls this philosophy "progressive goals." For example, Jeff shared he was proud of the team's effort to shave Time to Peak Volume, a metric of ramp speed, from eight weeks down to just three and a half. While it’s common in the consumer electronics market for a brand new product to have an end-to-end NPI process that takes 12-18 months, Jeff worked collaboratively to drive those numbers down to 9-12 months and, for some programs, as few as six. End-to-end. Mind-blowing. “Whatever it takes,” Jeff reiterated with a smile.
Toxic Behaviors and Mitigations
Eliminating fear and building psychological safety is probably the single most impactful thing a leader can do to get better execution and product performance.
Schedule Chicken. Multiple teams are having issues that would push the schedule out, but no one is willing to step up and assert the new schedule – so they present a fake schedule. Many leaders know this is happening – they keep the phony date and try to drive the team to get close to it. “But there’s also value in transparency,” Jeff says. It’s better to tell your team that you understand the schedule isn’t real and want to get involved to remove roadblocks and be part of the solution so they can get as close as possible to the original date. How do we work together to increase the probability of success on all the issues we’re chasing? Jeff acknowledges that there’s real tension here – as a leader, you cannot just let the schedule slip out all of the time – such that the team relaxes and becomes complacent – but you also don’t want a team that isn’t being transparent about the reality of the risk.
Complexity Safety Blankets. You’ll find complexity in SKU proliferation, specifications, requirements, and how you build and test the product. This most often comes up in generational products, where there are legacy tests and engineering specifications from many different teams that aren’t all needed anymore. His advice, “literally, challenge everything. Take a fresh, clean look at every program.” Complexity is a toxic behavior because it slows everything down – it takes you longer to figure out what the real problem is (or even if it is a real problem). It ties up labor and increases the cost and time to deliver the product, as well as the cost to the customer.
Goals without Offsets. Build a culture of balancing goals – every individual needs a goal and at least one offset goal to challenge them to perform at a higher level. Instead of instilling fear in an engineer for potentially bringing down the line, challenge them to identify opportunities to design faster, such as collaborating with their supply chain counterparts to get faster tool releases and devising ways to qualify tooling more efficiently. During the Early Field Failure Anlaysis (EFFA) stage, if the average time before a failure mode is identified to an improvement is rolling in is six weeks, ask the team to figure out how to make it four. The best people will rise to the challenge.