"Catch" those 5 principles to "boost" Product Development inspired by SpaceX

SpaceX pulled off its boldest test flight yet of the enormous Starship rocket on Sunday, catching the returning booster back at the launch pad with mechanical arms. Towering almost 121 meters, the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea.

It brings SpaceX’s ambition of developing a fully reusable and rapidly deployable rocket a big step closer.

"A day for the history books," engineers at SpaceX declared as the booster landed safely.

From a methodological point of view, the recent success of SpaceX and countless failures in the past have revealed the fundamental truth in product development and what we can learn from them.

Principle 1: first principle thinking

I think people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good. But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.

First principles thinking is a problem-solving approach that involves breaking down complex problems into their most basic, fundamental elements, and building solutions from there. Instead of relying on assumptions, analogies, or previous methods, it encourages thinking from the ground up, questioning everything, and understanding the core components of a problem.

His approach to understanding reality is to start with what is true — not with his intuition. The problem is that we don’t know as much as we think we do, so our intuition isn’t very good. We trick ourselves into thinking we know what’s possible and what’s not. The way Musk thinks is much different.

Every innovation, including the most groundbreaking ones, requires a long period of iteration and improvement, but they are always based on first principles, considering innovation, at its core, is about decomposing and recompositing.

Example: Elon Musk and Batteries

Elon Musk, a proponent of first principles thinking, famously applied this method to the cost of batteries for electric vehicles. Initially, the cost of batteries was considered prohibitively expensive. Instead of accepting this limitation, Musk broke the problem down to its first principles: What are the raw materials that make up a battery? He found that if you buy the raw materials (nickel, lithium, cobalt, etc.) separately, their cost was much lower than the cost of batteries on the market. This led to efforts to develop cheaper ways of producing batteries.

Benefits:

• Encourages deep, original thinking.
• Helps in overcoming outdated assumptions and limitations.
• Can lead to breakthrough innovations by focusing on fundamental truths.

In essence, first principles thinking is about getting to the root of problems and then rebuilding solutions based on fundamental, unshakeable truths.

Principle 2: Failures are the Pillars of Success

Nobody likes to be associated with failure, instead, focusing on iteratively reducing the transactional cost of failures and collecting feedbacks

SpaceX argues that these failures are also part of its development plan - to launch early in the expectation of failure so that it can collect as much data as possible and develop its systems quicker than its rivals.

Adhering to a fixed schedule based on phase-gate milestones in traditional development often defines success. Unfortunately, this approach forces decisions too early and can create false-positive feasibility. In agile development, milestones are based on objectively evaluating working systems.

This requires all teams, including hardware, to frequently integrate their incremental changes into the solution. contrasts the traditional approach with a continuous one. SpaceX strives to launch the next rocket version every 2-3 months to add new knowledge and data about the future solution.

Learning is the goal, even when tests may seem like a failure (see Musk’s tweet above). Instead of focusing on qualifying every component (and subassembly and assembly), SpaceX focuses on creating the infrastructure to test the next version of the solution quickly. The transaction costs for building and launching the next rocket are less than the holding costs of delayed learning.

Principle 3: process 5 steps of design in its intended order

The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist

In an interview conducted at Starbase Texas, Elon Musk has shared the 5-step design process he uses at Space X to achieve better results.? Below are the details of this design process.

• Make the requirements less dumb - “It does not matter who gave them to you. It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone’s wrong some of the time.”
• Delete a part of existing process. - Look critically at the process or piece you’re developing and try to remove pieces instead of always adding new things.? Work to understand the value that’s added by each part or each step in the process and reduce or eliminate those that don’t add value.
• “If you’re not occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards ‘Let’s add this part or process step in case we need it’. But you can basically make in-case arguments for so many things.”
• Simplify and Optimize. - Optimizing should only be done after you make your requirements less dumb and try to delete the part of process.? The most common mistake you can make is to optimize something that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
• Accelerate cycle time. - We want to reduce the amount of time from when we start working on something to when we finish.? The easiest way to do that is to focus on one thing at a time and eliminate task switching.? With that focus, you can get things done more quickly . . . just make sure they’re the right things.
• “You’re moving too slowly. Go faster, but don’t go faster until you work on the other three things first.”
• Automate. - Once the process is setup and optimized, automate it so that production happens automatically

To summarize, Elon's approach has reminded me of the Agile Manifesto Principle 10:

Simplicity -- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done --is essential.

An often quoted statistic is that according to the?Standish Groups’ Chaos Report (2014)?– 50% of the features that are built are rarely used. The accuracy of this statistic is debatable, but if you ask yourself about all the features built, how many of them are really necessary and how many are built like a yellow page document where majorities of the pages were never used?

For knowledge work, the scope for potential work is limitless. There is always more work than there is the capacity to deliver that work. Stakeholders will always ask for more, it is the job of product manager or product owner to continuously challenge and drive simplicity.

It is so easy to come up with the idea, but turn idea into reality is not that easy, and this is the job of agile product development, for each product manager, product owner, how to minimum effort and deliver the most value that customers do need and reduce waste and non-value added work throughout this process.

Principle 4: Scalability via Modularity

Modularity is very important to enable scalability, like Lego blocks. check out the video from Joe Justice here

Parallel development is when two components that have no dependencies on each other are able to be worked on at the same time instead of waiting on other teams to finish their components. This dramatically increases developer productivity. By removing the constraints (dependencies) with modularity, you empower teams to work in parallel. According to CA Technologies,?Agile Parallel Development?enables up to 90% more defects to be detected and up to a 50% reduction in a typical development schedule.

MBSE (Model-Based Systems Engineering) is the application of modelling systems as a cost-effective way to explore and document system characteristics. By testing and validating system characteristics early, models facilitate timely learning of properties and behaviors, enabling fast feedback on requirements and design decisions. Models provide an efficient way to explore, update, and communicate system aspects to stakeholders while significantly reducing or eliminating dependence on traditional documents.

There are three primary components of MBSE:

• the systems architecture model (SAM), which serves as a single source of truth for the initiatives
• engineering simulation software that determines whether what is in the SAM matches the requirements and whether it will operate as planned
• a centralized computation center, which can be cloud-based or physical, performs all functions and stores results.

Together, these parts comprise the digital thread, which ensures that when updates are made to one model, they are subsequently updated across all other models in the system.

Principle 5: Build the machine that builds the machine

Elon Musk frequently speaks about “building the machine that builds the machine,” where the factory first becomes a product in their overall process. In a manufacturing facility, this means investing in resources to increase the velocity of production and the density of manufacturable goods to increase output.

Musk sees at least an order of magnitude improvement in overall manufacturing efficiency by improving automation and increasing yield. Tesla acquired the German company Grohmann Automation in November 2016, which Elon Musk acknowledges as their first major investment towards automation and improved manufacturing capabilities.

Musk envisioned Gigafactories as colossal complexes spanning millions of square feet, capable of producing batteries in volumes that were previously unimaginable. By consolidating the entire battery production supply chain under one roof, Tesla could optimize manufacturing processes, minimize transportation costs, and achieve unparalleled efficiency. Additionally, the Gigafactory model would leverage renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, to power its operations, further aligning with Tesla’s commitment to sustainability.

This acquisition reflects Tesla’s goals to accelerate production and increase yield, with a long-term plan to drive down production costs through their investment.

To summarize,

Elon's SpaceX has shown us the way of how to revolutionize product development, and the funny thing is, there're no big secret, but require courage, resilience and investment to achieve what people claim to be unthinkable.

SpaceX’s product development process is built on principles of innovation, reusability, vertical integration, and iterative learning. By leveraging the principles above, they have challenged and redefined the norms of space exploration, leading to significant breakthroughs that have transformed the industry. From reusing rockets to rapidly prototyping next-generation spacecraft, SpaceX continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in aerospace.

Nothing is impossible until you start taking actions.

Source: Scaled Agile Inc.; SpaceX.; scrum.org, Model thinkers, Aaron Smet