How Do You Know You Need A Boost?
You Know You Need An Engineering Management Boost When ...
Your Engineering VP and Directors are working 60 hours a week on critical path technical content and all other management deliverables are low quality, late, or absent.
Weekly status meetings run three hours and you still don't know what you need to know.
Multiple projects are overloaded on the same people and schedules have become unpredictable.
You have openings but don't have time to fill them.
Design reviews are missing bugs causing extra revisions
Hero Stories - Past Successes
Digidesign Venue
Xros Optical Cross-Connect Switch
Xros Optical Cross-Connect Switch
Venue was a flagship multidisciplinary audio project to bring Digidesign plugins to the concert/live sound market, and the project was on fire.
When I started as Director Hardware Engineering, the project was in disarray and senior staff were bickering. I immediately scheduled design reviews among the seven hardware engineers and quickly
Venue was a flagship multidisciplinary audio project to bring Digidesign plugins to the concert/live sound market, and the project was on fire.
When I started as Director Hardware Engineering, the project was in disarray and senior staff were bickering. I immediately scheduled design reviews among the seven hardware engineers and quickly found that the main DSP card was badly stuck. Digi’s studio DSP boards each used nine Motorola 68K uP, each of those with external VRAM memory and a Digi ASIC, on a standard size PC-AT form factor. For live sound, the processor board engineer needed to add the stage interface to the studio design using a Micron triple-port RAM – I had seen this sole-source part before and had quickly passed it by for previous designs. Even with this ill-advised part, placement was impossibly dense and the project was grinding to a halt without a viable DSP solution. The CEO, a famed musician and producer, also wanted the processors in the console instead of in a tower PC chassis, and that was proving to be very challenging.
The processor engineer resigned after his design review (!), and I reassigned a promising junior engineer. I expanded the chassis to a non-standard PC height to grow board area and changed the processor system architecture to allow the use of standard VRAMs. I had a passionate one-on-one meeting with the CEO to split the console and processor chassis.
In the end, we had to spin the server chassis and DSP card to meet FCC Class B for House of Worship markets, but in the end, it was worth it. Venue (Concert/Church Pro-Tools Live Sound) commanded all top ten artist concert slots for 3 years in a row by introducing the first plug-in architecture to the LiveSound market.
While I was at Digidesign, I delivered 11 major product launches and got an Oscar, grew revenue from $80M to $200M, At the peak of Digi’s hardware development, I led concurrent development of 37 PCBAs; managed all component sourcing & fabrication.
Xros Optical Cross-Connect Switch
Xros Optical Cross-Connect Switch
Xros Optical Cross-Connect Switch
At Xros, a MEMS-based optical switching startup spun out of Stanford, I partnered with Tim Slater (then a Stanford post-doc) to take a handful of prototype MEMS mirrors to production-ready 288- and 1152-port optical cross-connects.
The day I was hired, my new boss, asked me to meet with a difficult engineer and decide to keep or fire him.
At Xros, a MEMS-based optical switching startup spun out of Stanford, I partnered with Tim Slater (then a Stanford post-doc) to take a handful of prototype MEMS mirrors to production-ready 288- and 1152-port optical cross-connects.
The day I was hired, my new boss, asked me to meet with a difficult engineer and decide to keep or fire him. That difficult engineer turned out to be the key to our success, and in the end, the best multidisciplinary debugger that I have ever worked with.
The real challenge was that static drive is dynamically unstable due to the inverse square law, and that MEMS mirrors without active servo control crash into the substrate and break. Furthermore, the MEMS mirrors were driven with 120V static drive, and I was told that we’d get the drive voltage down to 90 volts. We needed a pair of ADI 21065 DSPs running in parallel to run each set of 16 input and output mirrors, and each side of a redundant 1152 port system needed 72 DSPs on 36 Servo modules– this was the first commercial application of parallel ADI 21065s.
In the end, the three-rack system integrated 200V static drive, 10 mV precision-strain sensing, and nearly 150 ADI 21065 DSPs controlling more than 4,600 MEMS mirrors — contributing to our $3.25B acquisition by Nortel.
An Expert Engineering Boost From The Fixer
Leadership
A leader brings the team together to overcome the challenges and deficiencies of the past. A leader understands people, product and process.
Design Reviews
Design reviews are the key to the sole of an engineering project, and the first step in understanding requirements, architecture, implementation, process, and staffing.
Problem Identification
Problem areas in architecture, implementation, process and staffing must be quickly identified and prioritized by a multidisciplinary leader who can understand all of the technology in play.
Architecture and Design Changes
Fundamental architectural assumptions must be revalidated against customer MVP and final product requirements to correct mistaken assumptions and limitations that constrain the solution space.
Staffing Changes
Most technology, architecture and design problems are the result of one or more resourcing issues. Understanding technical issues often leads to a need to adjust resourcing.
Process
Without repeatable process, success is inconsistent or fleeting. Even getting it right once means getting everything right, checked and double checked. Processes can vary significantly from mobile application UI to chip design, so understanding the right level of process for your project is key.