The Algorithm
Elon Musk's secret sauce for shipping great products
Recently I have been reading Walter Isaacson’s excellent new biography of Elon Musk. Isaacson is the writer that also brought us the seminal biographies of Steve Jobs, Da Vinci, and other great minds that have shaped our world. I thought if there was one book I should read on Rocket Man, it would be this one.
What I love about Isaacson’s books is that they humanize these people that we usually only know from afar and based on their achievements. He writes about them with such intimacy that it really feels like you are following the person around (which is what Isaacson did for 2 years with Musk while researching for the book).
Isaacson writes in a very balanced way, highlighting the great achievements but also shining a light on all the ugly parts. As with the Steve Jobs biography, the book is not an act of fan service or marketing, but a revealing picture of a highly accomplished but clearly very troubled man. In the acknowledgments, it was noted that Musk did not ask to, nor did he read the book before it went to print.
Now, I am not an Elon Musk fanboy. He barely even enters my locus of attention on a regular basis outside of reading this book. I have no dreams of owning a Tesla (my trusty 10-year-old Honda Fit serves me just fine). I’m well aware that Musk’s name is surrounded by controversy and he has done and said some problematic things in the past and will likely continue to do so.
But some things are undeniable. No matter what you think about Musk, it would be hard to deny that he has significantly altered the trajectory of humanity by:
Greatly accelerating the adoption of electric cars
Driving key advancements in solar energy technology
Speeding up the development of supporting electrification infrastructure which has in turn made a future without burning fossil fuels for energy seem within reach
Creating reliable technology to deliver humans and cargo into orbit at a fraction of the cost that was previously considered possible
That’s just to name a few. There’s more stuff I’m glossing over. There’s also a lot of dumb stuff that he seemed to do on a whim.
Would someone else have done these things eventually? Maybe.
Is it a good thing that so many of these critical developments are being steered by one very obviously flawed man? Probably not.
I still haven’t finished the book, but one thing that is highly applicable to design has stood out to me. Musk has a philosophy around shipping great products he calls, "The Algorithm”. He developed this philosophy when Tesla was going through a live or die gauntlet when trying to ramp up production on the Model 3, and has consistently applied it since to cars, rockets, robots, human brain computer interfaces, and more.
Here it is, quoted in full:
Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.
Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.
As I was reading about the algorithm and how Musk applies it throughout his many endeavors, I saw lots of parallels to things I had learned and applied as a designer and a leader.
Question every requirement is a great mantra to have when designing products. A lot of times (especially when designing complex technology products), when a designer is brought into a project, the problem has already been over-constrained by engineers. And if you don’t question those requirements and think critically about their validity, you end up with what is essentially an average of the constraints with some lipstick on it.
Delete any part and process you can is especially applicable if you subscribe to a more minimalist philosophy of design. One thing I learned very early on at Bould Design was, “don’t ever be afraid to make it too simple”. We often hold many assumptions about what is essential to a product both functionally and aesthetically and don’t see that they were in fact unnecessary until we try it. This can, of course, be taken to an extreme (👀 Apple) that backfires.
I can see clear parallels in the last three points to managing design teams.
Simplify and optimize (after step 1 and 2). Designers, if left to their own devices, will often spend time refining (optimizing) something before it’s clear that it’s even necessary or ready for refinement. This part of the process is best left to when the functional and aesthetic essentials are resolved.
Accelerate and automate. When I was managing a design team, I did a lot to speed up repeated tasks and even eliminate them entirely through automation. I set up templates for presentations, workflows for batch rendering, and an almost entirely automated client invoicing process. Design often necessitates a certain amount of repeat work. With good organization and especially now with the added superpowers of technology and AI tools, I believe these points will become especially applicable to designers in the future to reduce rote work and make more time for creativity.
In Isaacson’s book, there are countless examples of Musk applying his algorithm to drive breakthroughs in the development of rockets or cars or other products. He applies each point maniacally to an extreme and usually breaks a few people in the process. I’m not suggesting we should apply what you read in this book as if it was a user manual (though I’m sure some people will try), but there’s something to be learned from Musk here for us as makers and designers of things.
Though perhaps not as clearly as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk has has had a huge impact on us as designers, influencing not just the kinds of products that we will be designing, but the kind of future we will be designing for. One thing is clear - just like Jobs, Musk understood how important design was to creating a great product, and always kept it as a core focus.
If you are a designer, I’d highly recommend you give the book a read. If you do, let me know what you think!
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