Marcel Tremblay: The Olympic Mindset & Engineering Leadership

Marcel Tremblay is one of the friendliest engineering leaders I’ve ever met. We first crossed paths years ago when Marcel was the Director of Engineering at FLIR, and he became an early customer of Instrumental. When you first meet him, Marcel is warm and affable – but behind that charming Québécois accent, he’s an engineer’s engineer. When he’s not teaching students about engineering and management at UCSB, you can find him on the water: he’s an avid sailor whose passion for the water led FLIR to enter a whole new sector.

It wasn’t until I had known Marcel for years that I also learned he was an Olympian. Given the intensity and deliberate approach to everything he does, it fits. I sat down with Marcel to learn more about his unique career, his unique competitive lens, and his dedication to innovation.

Cultivating an Olympic Mindset

Before Marcel was an engineer and leader working on technology, he was a speed skater. The first time he tried out for the Sarajevo Olympics, he missed qualifying for the Canadian team by a tenth of a second. For the next four years, Marcel focused on getting faster. But not by a fraction of a second – he had his eye on beating the 1984 gold medal-winning time.  

When Marcel got the opportunity to compete in Calgary four years later, he beat that gold medal record. But so did 26 of his competitors. It was a tough lesson: "The planet doesn’t stop. Everyone is improving.”

Marcel took it to heart, and it’s become one of his guiding principles in business. “When you compare yourself to your competitors, thinking that a feature you implement two years from now will put you ahead of the game doesn’t account for how they’ll be using those two years. You need to leap way ahead to outperform the others.”

That’s not the only thing that Marcel took away from his experience. “You don’t get there without effort. You need a vision. Not for your career, but for the product, the company, the why.”

The why is perhaps Marcel’s most important guiding question.

You Have to Believe It to Achieve It

Marcel’s jaw hit the floor when a client asked him to do the impossible: shave 50 grams off a 55-gram camera. But the client, who was building a UAV for the US government, went on to explain why they needed the impossible. A heavier camera required more battery power to keep the drone airborne. More battery power required a bigger battery that added additional weight, which required more power, and so on.

Now Marcel understood the importance behind the ask, and they got to work. From redesigning the camera enclosure to piggybacking on other features of the UAV, Marcel’s team came up with innovation after innovation and succeeded in dropping the camera’s weight by over 90%.

By equipping his team with a why that mattered, he motivated them to think beyond everything they thought was possible. “It’s not doable if you don’t believe in it,” Marcel explains.

Hacking Your Mindset to Foster Innovation

Marcel’s why provides the vision and motivation for a project. But that’s only half of the equation. The other half is how, and he leaves that up to his people.  “I want the answer to come from my team,” he reasons. “If I tell them the solution, then there’s no innovation.” By starting with the vision and working backward, Marcel’s team is given the opportunity to solve it using their unique skillsets and experiences. Marcel insists it’s crucial for managers not to impose their own answer to the problem - a team that’s empowered quite often creates a solution that a manager wouldn’t have created on their own.

It’s hard to innovate on command, however. “You can’t innovate under pressure. As soon as you have stress, nothing comes up.” To help usher in a round of brainstorming, Marcel implemented Innovation Mondays – a monthly day when engineers were free from deadlines and meetings.

Marcel’s a big believer in locating himself above the line: a mindset that promotes openness and curiosity. It requires being relaxed and receptive. Like that moment when you’re just waking up: “It’s absolutely not the time to pick up your phone and look at emails because you ruin the best moment of the day.” If a problem persists that Marcel can’t solve, he’ll take a walk or go cycling.

He calls this passive, almost meditative detachment his secret to innovation.

Rethink Management as Managing Risk

At UCSB, Marcel instructs aspiring engineers to think differently about the basics of their job. One experience he comes back to was during his time at Ericsson when a Swedish project manager replaced deadlines with risks.

“He came in and, on his first day, meets everyone and says, ‘Let’s do a risk analysis.’” They broke down everything that could go wrong with the project and stashed it in a drawer. The next week, the project manager asks, “Who worked on the top five risks?” No one was thinking about it. That’s when Marcel was called up to the chopping block: what had he, the mechanical engineer, done to address the thermal issues the product would face?

Nothing. The other teams hadn’t gotten back to him with the basics of the product’s design – no description of size, power requirements, etc. But he did know some of the basic parameters of the product, like the maximum size it could be. Working backward from there, he came up with answers that started to inform other departments – and, in the process, took his risk off the table. The team worked systematically to do the same, with the highest risks addressed first, moving down in priority.

Focusing on risks instead of deadlines focused the team and reprioritized how they worked. “I’m not going to ask you when the drawings are done. You’re a professional, and you know this needs to be done in six months,” Marcel recalled the manager saying. It is up to everyone to operate like it is their own company and their own product – and to deliver on a timeline that reflects it. “It was the only product in my entire career that was done on time.”

Reduce Risk by Making It Real

The shortcoming of focusing on mitigating risks on paper is that some risks require interaction with the real world – such as usability. The only way to mitigate usability is to get to a prototype as soon as possible, which Marcel prioritizes with his teams.

Marcel experienced this firsthand while developing a marine camera with a zoom lens intended for law enforcement. The idea was simple: a Coast Guard boat could locate someone from the water and then zoom in on the person. They designed a camera with a single zoom lens. They produced it according to the specs, including thermal analysis and vibration testing. But to test the field of view, they needed a prototype to try out in the field.

In reality, it was a failure, even though everything technically worked as intended. The lens took too much time to zoom in, and the instability presented by a rocking boat meant the user lost their target during that time. Marcel and his team were able to shift to a solution – two lenses, one wide and one narrow – that allowed the user to switch between them instantly. And by eliminating the zoom mechanism, they gained bonus savings on weight.

Marcel’s early prototype allowed him to address the usability risk of the design before sinking more resources into a flawed design. The time and resources he saved have made him an evangelist for prototyping as quickly as possible when developing something new.

Make it Real to Have Impact

One of Marcel’s biggest business impacts at FLIR was his role in kickstarting the acquisition of Raymarine.

Marcel, an avid sailor, was on the water one night when he began to ponder why FLIR, a company specializing in thermal imaging cameras, didn’t create a camera to help people on boats navigate in the dark.

It seemed like a simple, if not obvious, product his company could create. When Marcel approached his managers with his vision, they said they didn’t know the market.

So Marcel took it upon himself to show people his vision: he acquired a spotlight, removed its guts, installed one of FLIR’s thermal cameras, and showed everyone the footage he captured from his boat the next day.

The prototype demo was a success. Even though FLIR didn’t have the reach in the marine sector at the time for Marcel’s invention to penetrate, he was given approval to continue development. The product that Marcel and his team created would be so groundbreaking that it cracked open an entire new line of business - marine electronics - for FLIR to explore, leading to FLIR’s acquisition of Raymarine to distribute their thermal cameras.

Had it not been for Marcel’s question, “Why aren’t we building our cameras for boats?”, he never would have triggered the chain of events that led to FLIR’s development of marine instrumentation, a product line that grossed $424 million in sales in 2021.

For Marcel, it’s further proof that opportunities to innovate are everywhere, and even a single engineer can have an enormous impact on the bottom line.  

Marcel’s Simple Recipe

Marcel summarizes his approach to work and management in a few sentences: “I don’t micromanage. I never give orders or tell people what to do or how to do it. I show the vision.”

He calls it his simple recipe, but don’t let the name fool you. At its core, it implements all the life lessons Marcel has learned. By sharing his vision and explaining the why, he motivates his people to accomplish the impossible. By giving his team the opportunity to solve the problem on their own, he fosters above-the-line curiosity and the innovation that has propelled his own career. By avoiding micromanagement, he guides their vision toward their own gold-medal accomplishment. 

Marcel is an accomplished engineer, lecturer, and leader, but undoubtedly, he is an Olympian at heart.