Elon Musk's Design Philosophy (2024)

Elon Musk is notorious when it comes down to innovative design & eliminating waste in the process. Driving Tesla day to day able to witness minimalist design thinking without clutter of buttons & controls. He reportedly rewards innovation within the firm and remove people who doesn't do much in this space. I have complied three major design guidelines from his conversations at Tesla & SpaceX, there is so much weight in these simple but yet powerful ideas.

1- Taking too long, design might be wrong!

If your design is taking too long to implement, the design might be wrong. I have seen this time & time again in the organizations.

Fundamental Problems

Sticking to a design when its very complicated
Not able to learn from past mistakes, maybe due to unintentional ego
Not able to take advise from other smart people around you, again check any ego issues

Action >>

The design must be modified to accelerate the progress, if it's not working' change it, maybe simplify processes & steps. Change your direction when new evidence provided, and say 'thank you' to the person who helped you. Remove the stigma against accepting mistakes & embrace better ideas when it makes sense.

2- Question the constraints

Product errors reflects the organizational errors, many times the product problems is only the symptom not the real problem. Organizational level errors can be in form of fundamental belief system, perceived constraints & assumptions. This is also a classic problem within the organizations, many times the imposed constraints are unproven, highly biased or simply obsolete but passed around without verification & proper rigor.

False constraints blocks organizations to be innovative & lose market share because of fierce competition & inability to adapt changes in the landscape.

Fundamental Problems

Constraints are not questioned, propagated from one team to another without evidence
Getting offended when questioned around fundamental assumptions
Afraid to question smart people or heavy titles, since it can lead to punishing outcomes
Through the passage of time many assumptions may no longer be valid

Action >>

Always respectfully question given constraints by assuming that assumptions might be wrong, because constraints can't be perfect (on flip side). Constraints that are given to you are guaranteed to be wrong to some degree. Remove fear based culture where asking hard questions with good intentions is treated with punishing behavior.

3- Don't try to optimize things which shouldn't exist

This is the biggest mistake smart engineers do, they optimize anything given to them without questioning, that it should exist or not in the first place? most of us as engineers are guilty to this.

Fundamental Problems

We learn not to question the teacher in college & any authority, its usually punishable with bad grades, blocking promotions & social outcast
We really want to improve things as an engineer, thats what we are taught to do
We see things in isolation as parts, rather than a system. So we improve a part of the process without thinking whether it's needed for overall system?

Action >>

Delete parts & processes to improve the efficiency & acceleration of the product development. Remove unnecessary or redundant things, don't just jump into improving something which isn't needed in the first place. Ask, can we totally eliminate this?

Understand the big picture around the system as a whole, zoom out from time to time.

References

A conversation with Elon Musk about Starship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg