What is your five-step engineering process?

“First make your requirements less dumb, your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. Step two, delete the part or process step… if you’re not adding things back in 10% of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough. The reason it’s the third step is ’cause it’s very common, possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. Accelerate cycle time. You’re moving too slowly, go faster, but don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first. …don’t dig it faster, stop digging your grave. The final step is automate. And now I have personally made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. …literally I automated, accelerated, simplified and then deleted.”

— Elon Musk, August 2021 · Watch: Everyday Astronaut video 13:36 ↗