Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S1E52 Solving Problems, Prototyping, and the Power of Diversity in R&D | Martha Ganesh
While she currently serves as the Director of Operations (at Scientia Vascular), Martha has spent much of her career in R&D environments. Her keen organizational skills and perspective on diversity have allowed her to work within, and also develop, R&D teams that succeed based on clearly defined goals, knowing when a design is “good enough”, and the hard-earned lessons that only come with experience.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
The being an engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people, resources and opportunities. Enjoy the show.
Martha Ganesh:you know, people will come up to you and they'll try and hand you their ball, whatever their problem is, whatever's going on, they'll give it to you and say, fix this for me. You got to give it back to them and say, How can I help you fix it?
Aaron Moncur:Hello, and welcome to another episode of The being an engineer podcast. Our guest today is Martha Ganesh, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering as well as an MBA. Much of Martha's career has been spent in an r&d role. And she currently serves as the Director of Operations at cyanea vascular Martha, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. All right. So Martha, tell us what what was it about engineering that first intrigued you? Why did you decide to pursue a career in engineering?
Martha Ganesh:While I actually started college as a social work major, and I decided that I didn't actually like to listen to people's feelings. So I tried to find a degree that was as far away from feelings as I could get. And I I was working in the math lab trying to pass remedial math and all of the tutors were engineering students, and they were building a giant Trevi Shea to throw pumpkins. And I thought, that sounds way better than what I'm doing. That sounds really cool.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. And engineering seems like a good field to avoid feelings. I can't say that I have had many, you know, Heart to Heart emotional conversations with my team.
Martha Ganesh:You know, I thought that too. And then I made the poor life choice of moving into operations. And it's full of feelings. So interesting, but actually quite like running the business. But there are definitely feelings. And so I'm often grateful for that little bit of experience I had with social work, I almost use it more now than the engineering principles.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Tell me more about that. So you're the Director of Operations at a medical device company? How How, how have you seen feelings come into play?
Martha Ganesh:Well, I manage all of the production people, as well as all the manufacturing engineering, resources. And all of the production people definitely are not skilled in the way of data processing or analytics. And so they often feel like their feelings have been hurt, or someone said something mean, or the world is not fair. And I think especially during this pandemic, there's been lots of feelings about continuing to work in a manufacturing environment.
Aaron Moncur:That is a pretty powerful statement. Yeah. How? How, how have you dealt with this? Do you have any, you know, best practices or what what has worked for you to help put at ease their concerns?
Martha Ganesh:Yeah. So I think that spending that time and making sure you have those hard conversations and talking about how the world is changing, and what we're doing about it, I think we've pivoted really quickly and, you know, spread people out and increase the air exchanges in our cleanroom. And so telling people what you're doing behind the scenes to ensure their safety has really gone a long way to supporting them.
Aaron Moncur:What What do you say to me, when I come up to and say, Martha, this is just not fair. This situation? I'm in this this this? I don't know, rule that you've given me, it's not fair. Fix it for me, what what do you say?
Martha Ganesh:Well, typically I start with that life is not fair. And let's look at it from a different perspective. And, and my boss had the best analogy. He said, You know, people will come up to you, and they'll try and hand you their ball, whatever their problem is, whatever's going on, they'll give it to you and say, fix this for me. You got to give it back to him and say, How can I help you fix it?
Aaron Moncur:That sounds very wise.
Martha Ganesh:Yes, it is. But also challenging. It's, it's it's much easier to have somebody emotionally come in your office and say, here's how I'm going to fix this for you. Where, really, it's, sometimes it's not a fixable problem, and we need to look at it from a different perspective.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. How can you teach a man to fish instead of giving? Yes, him or her fish? Yes. Well, let's let's back up a little bit and talk about r&d days because you spent a lot of time in r&d before you were a director of operations. What's on your channel? list for starting a new r&d project, you know, what is that kind of mental checklist? Or I don't know, maybe it's a physical checklist that you go through as an engineer.
Martha Ganesh:Sure. So um, interestingly, my time in r&d was actually spent not designing things. So what what I was hired to do was to speed up the development process and and to do that they would partner me with with sort of the idea person, and I would help organize their thoughts and organize their projects so that it could transfer into manufacturing, and really overlaying those two activities at the same time. And so what I would recommend for an r&d project is to understand the scope to even pause long enough to try and put it down on paper and, and regurgitate it back to the business like you want me to make this or this is the problem I'm trying to solve. Because so often, I think people are two or three miles down the road before they they go back and see what the scope actually was. Because I think most people will find that marketing and r&d have very different ideas. And the r&d interpretation of the marketing idea is rather different, usually.
Aaron Moncur:And how do you confirm that r&d, his idea of the goal aligns with marketing's version of that goal? What what are the tools you use to do that?
Martha Ganesh:I think that early and often communication and, and radical transparency, like being able to say to the marketing person, this is what I am working on, and be totally open to them saying that's totally wrong. That's a ridiculous idea. Like, I think there's a little bit of vulnerability in there that you have to be okay with.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Do you to have these conversations? Have you had any formal structures in place like the daily stand up? Or are there you know, formal documents to clearly say this? Is the goal for the project? Or is it more just a casual conversation that you have in the hallway?
Martha Ganesh:I think I think having a formal scope document that someone has to sign gives you a great frame of reference, because I think engineers also suffer from scope creep and scope change. And if it's never been written down, and no one signed off on it, it's super easy for the business to come say, Hey, can you add these eight more configurations? And you say, Sure, I can do it. But you need to say back to the business. And this is how much longer it'll take. This is how much more money I need. It's Yes,
Aaron Moncur:I can do it. And Yep,
Martha Ganesh:always and yes. And or, yes. But,
Aaron Moncur:yes, that's another one of my favorites. Yes. But yeah, but yes, but okay. One of the things that I have struggled with managing r&d projects specifically is estimating, right? Not so much. Well, yeah, it is estimating the cost for an r&d project, right, when it's just not really clear how to get from A to Z. But then also in in even to a greater extent, understanding how far through the process we actually are at any given point, right? I can look at the budget and say, Okay, we're 50% through the budget, are we actually halfway done with the project? Have you found any tools or strategies to manage that any better?
Martha Ganesh:Yes. So with Junior engineers that work for me, I actually have them start doing that on projects that don't necessarily have defined budgets or defined timelines, and really use those early projects to sort of polish up their crystal ball. So So in a project that doesn't have a timeline and doesn't have a budget, have them estimate one, have them, have them track to a timeline so that when they are missing it, they can sort of recalibrate what these different phase gates are walking through look like.
Aaron Moncur:I had a question. I follow up on that, and then I just lost it. It's gonna come to me, for junior engineers, for now, not for junior engineers. Well, it'll come to me later at some point. Oh, I know what it was. It wasn't a question. It was more of a comment. So it sounds like what you're saying is, it's really it comes down to experience, you know, having gone through some of these projects without well defined budgets, or well defined schedules, and just seeing what happens a few times at that point, you begin to have the experience to say, Okay, well, we don't know exactly how to get from A to Z. But I think it's going to cost this much and I think it's going to take about this long.
Martha Ganesh:Yeah. And so I think it's important for our junior engineers to see early on how wrong they consistently are, because everybody thinks their project will be faster and cheaper and than anybody else's before and it just never It's true ever.
Aaron Moncur:I agree with that. I wonder, do you have any rules of thumb where maybe you've been asked to estimate the cost of a project via r&d or not? And is there a rule of thumb where you you do your best of estimating? I think it's going to, you know, take this long and cost this much. That's what I think. But I don't know what I don't know. So it's what I'm going to tell, you know, the team or management or whatever, is it this plus 25%, or anything like that?
Martha Ganesh:No, I definitely don't, because I find management does that. And if you, if you go into it presenting a higher budget, then either they'll consistently cut your budget because they know you're fluffy, or, or so I go. And I really tried to look at it, I think everyone's really great at estimating the next thing they have to do, but not so great at looking at the entire project in all of the different activities, like the space I've played in transfer to manufacturing is really, really easy one to overlook, like you don't order enough raw materials, you don't consider enough time for process development. And so really, you know, taking a couple days to step through what a full project plan would look like. I think especially looking outside of your expertise, helps develop a better project schedule, and, and budget, because usually people aren't doing something that hasn't been done before. And people just start asking what the other experiences have been.
Aaron Moncur:Hmm, that's a good point there. Something I found the good engineering is often, like many things in life, it's often a result of asking good questions. It's kind of a broad question. But are there any standard or default questions that you'd like to ask yourself during the r&d process?
Martha Ganesh:I think I'd like to talk to everyone, I think that it's super easy to go to the project leader and get the high fluffy answers. But I like to go to the people that will be doing the work, and spend the time with them and understand the scope of their work.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I don't know if you ever experienced this, but something I experienced on occasion is I'll get into the details of a project and I'll be trying to solve something, you know, maybe it's a design problem, maybe it's a business problem. But I'll be trying to solve something. And I'll notice that my mind is going back and forth between option one and option two and option 3.4. And it becomes kind of a chaotic mess in my mind where I'm bouncing around a lot between different options or ideas, but I'm not actually getting anything done. And I've come up with this process for myself, to get out of that mindset where it's a four step process, it's Well number one is is identify the chaos, right? That that mindset where you're bouncing around, but you're not actually getting anything done, you're not progressing. So that's number one, identify the chaos. And then number two is clarify the goal. And I like to write it out. Because I feel like if you can't write out your goal clearly in a sentence or two, then you don't really understand what your goal is. And you certainly can't communicate it to someone else. And then how do you know if you've met it or not? Exactly right? How do you measure success if you don't have a clearly defined goal. So that's number two. Number three, for me is take some kind of action, even if it might not be the right action, do something. And I find that even if I'm not even if it turns out to not be the right thing, just the act of doing something triggers, processes in your mind that lead to the right thing, you know. And then and then fourth is ask for help soon. You know, if if you're really just not getting anywhere, don't keep spinning your wheels, ask someone else for help. And that that this is Aaron's four step process to productivity here. I found that to be really helpful for me. But do you ever get into that? I wonder if it's, you know, it's a really rare thing that happens with me where and this mental chaos or if that happens often with others.
Martha Ganesh:Now, I think I'm pretty decisive. And I think that that what I would want to encourage the other engineer should do is, is that step you're talking about where you need to take some action. Often people will add cost or add complexity for the sake of doing something. And I would like to encourage people to try and go the other way, try to take whatever it is you've done and simplify it. And I think that I think that getting to something that both meets the design intent, but then is manufacturable makes it so that you can actually sell it
Aaron Moncur:Are you saying that when a tough challenge arises, it's easier maybe to implement a costly solution, because it's maybe the first solution that comes to shove. Whereas if you were to spend a little bit longer, you might come to a better solution that that isn't costly, even though it's going to take you a little bit longer to find that solution.
Martha Ganesh:More like when you're stuck to see this moving forward, you can simplify what what your last idea was that didn't work, maybe like with coding how you can write this really long, complex code. But when you can get it down to just those few beautiful lines, that it's better than whatever that complicated Are you sent it through us? Sure. Yeah. And I think I think a lot of people don't know when good is good enough?
Aaron Moncur:That's a big point.
Martha Ganesh:Yes. Yeah. I think people always want to make it better and superior. And it's your design. So it's got to be the sexiest, but it definitely doesn't.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, at a certain point to that point, I think is more often than not earlier than we think, done is better than perfect. Yep, absolutely. Now, how has diversity, if at all, help your teams of the past solve hard problems, or, or maybe generate new ideas that a less diverse team may not have identified?
Martha Ganesh:Yeah, I think, um, as being one of the diversity candidates that is typically on a team, I think that just having this completely different view of having, like, solving a problem is really, really valuable. And so I'll try and get as many different answers as possible from as many different sources because people think really, really differently. And, and it's really beautiful to see how the same problem can be solved so many different ways. And so having diversity on a team, especially engineers, and not engineers, and you know, people of different ethnic backgrounds, really helps skin the cat a different way.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I had an experience recently where our team was trying to find a way to organize really small diameter, fibers or filaments. And we had all kind of brainstormed and thought, okay, we could try this, or we could try that. And we pulled in another team member who has a background in genetics, actually. And he was good at going into the field of genetics, before he ever decided that maybe engineering would be interesting. And he started brainstorming and came up with this idea of a centrifuge, spin these fibers. And I don't know if it's gonna work or not, we're looking into it. But it was such an interesting idea, and one that none of us had come up with. And just the fact that he had this more diverse background than Yeah, the cluster of engineers who all had the same background, that was really helpful.
Martha Ganesh:Yeah. Yeah, I would say on the on the operation side, asking the production person that does essentially that for 10 hours a day, is very valuable, even though they don't have an engineering background, they can bring that practical piece into it.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, absolutely. I found that building something to test quickly, can be very helpful in the early stages of an r&d or design project. 3d printing is fantastic for this because it's relatively quick and relatively inexpensive. Can you think of Are there other quick and dirty benchtop prototyping tools that your teams have used in the past that have been pretty useful?
Martha Ganesh:I think even just having an area where you have the base raw materials, and you can glue things together is is incredibly valuable. And I think I would encourage people not to not be afraid to fail, because you learn more from that, then whatever perfect thing you perfectly made, like just try just do something. Yep. Just do something and then know when it's good enough.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. You talked about the those base materials, what would you consider the base materials for a little r&d lab?
Martha Ganesh:You know, it depends on on the application. Prior to this, when I was at BD medical, it would be having all of the different tubes and lewers that you'd be gluing together and you'd be able to come up with a new catheter idea pretty quickly. But here at santia, we make neurovascular guide wires and that toolboxes is radically different. It's very small wires with very small components. So making sure you have enough of those to create with I think is really important. Yeah, we
Aaron Moncur:have, we have Legos and we have clay, and we have cardboard and PVC pipe and wood and wow, what do you make? I'm sorry, what do you what do you prototyping? What do you make? Oh, well, that is just I promised everyone I didn't even plan this. But that's a perfect segue. Why don't I take just a couple seconds right now and share with everyone that test fixture design comm is where you can learn more about how pipeline helps medical device engineering teams. And we develop custom test fixtures and automated equipment. So it might be some kind of adapter for an instrument load sale, it might be a cycle test machine, it might be an automated inspection station, or an assembly jag or some piece of production equipment. But that's that's what we work on.
Martha Ganesh:So if I needed something like that, not find either. What I just go to the website,
Aaron Moncur:we can talk after the show, how about that? I know someone that you can talk to great. How funny. All right, well, I'm Martha King, can you think of and share maybe one big success in one big failure that you've had in your career and what you learned from from each of those? Oh,
Martha Ganesh:I think on the success side, I would encourage people that it doesn't, it's not often fast that sometimes you can look back after three years of selling a new design that you fought hard for that femininely has sold $16 million that year and saved 1000s of lives, I would consider that a pretty huge success that in the moment, did not feel like a success. It felt like a fight and a challenge. And there's just one group in front of another group in front of a nother problem in front of a regulatory body and just maybe pause and look back and see how amazing what you've done has been. And then on the on the failure side, I think my biggest failure came pretty early in my career and and absolutely set the cadence for how carefully I check things. But what had happened is we were I was working at a small OEM and we were working on a new launch for Bard. And the VP of operations had come in and said, You know, I had this dream that this word was spelled wrong on this catheter. And we went and looked and sure enough, now it was spelled wrong, we spelled injectable wrong. And so we printed it with the steel print plates. And I called up the company in Florida and asked them, you know how much it would cost to overnight a plate and they said that would take an act of God. And the company made me call them back and ask them what an act of God would cost. So we ended up hiring a courier in Florida who flew in the plate overnight, and we met the we met the courier at the airport that the new print plate and reprinted all of the launch quantities over the weekend. And I'll tell you that act of God cost about $15,000. But yeah, but you know, I think intuition goes a long ways. And if something feels weird, you should go look.
Aaron Moncur:Oh, that's a big, that's a big point. Right? our guts are smart,
Martha Ganesh:I think. Yeah. Yep. And knowing when to look at that gut instinct, like just take those few minutes and go look and see what you're feeling because it could it could lead to a lot of time savings later. Like if you're like, Oh, this joint, it just doesn't quite go tensile test it like go challenge it. Go take a look and save all of that heartache later. Because also too if if something really terrible doesn't happen during the development process, it means it just hasn't happened yet.
Aaron Moncur:An old boss of mine told me once that to do this job well meaning being a an r&d engineer. You have to be a little paranoid. And I've always remembered that I thought it was such great advice. Yeah. Let me put you on the spot just a little bit here and ask you can you think of a time when you wanted to give up because whatever you were doing was just too hard. But you didn't give up? And can you share with us why you didn't give up and kind of what you took away from that experience? Um,
Martha Ganesh:I have not ever wanted to give up but I do tell people If it were easy, they wouldn't need us. Very true. Yeah, if it if it just didn't go a little sideways, it could just run like, these projects would be super predictable. And they would have, I don't know, one person invents stuff and another person launch stuff. And you wouldn't have to do all this iteration and this testing and, and make sure your suppliers are capable and your raw material supply won't explode during an earthquake. Like just just it's not easy. This job is not easy. And I also tell my engineers that that's why we studied spherical chickens neglecting wind resistance in school, they were trying to see if you would give up. I
Aaron Moncur:speaking of school, I remember a physics class that I had, I think it was electromagnetism. And it was hard. It was a really, it was one of those wieder classes, you know. And I remember sitting in the the TA lab, getting some help with this. And even after the TA had explained it, I just didn't get it. And this was, must have been maybe a sophomore in college at the time. Anyway, I got I got really kind of frustrated with myself. And I thought to myself, this is engineering is really hard. I had taken a few of the engineering classes. And this one was just kicking my butt. And I remember very clearly wanting to give up, I thought, I don't know that I can do this, I may have picked the wrong major. Maybe I need to find something more simple. And and then I don't know why exactly. But something in my brain switched. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to do this, I'm going to figure it out. I don't care how hard it is. I'm just going to push through it and figure it out. And I did. And I think one of the things that taught it was that successful people not not that I'm in a huge success, but people who are successful, it's often a result of of tenacity, and perseverance, more than just being really smart.
Martha Ganesh:Yeah, 1,000% I think that I read a paper once that said, you should never tell your children that they're really smart. Because smartness has a cap, you should tell them they work really hard, because you can always work harder.
Aaron Moncur:That's phenomenal. Yeah, give them something that they really truly have control over. Right? Yep. One of the challenges that that we've encountered as a team in r&d is effective communication. And I think this is probably something you know, a lot of teams not necessarily struggle with, but look for opportunities in which they can improve. Specifically, when we have three or four engineers spooled up evaluating various early stage concepts, it can be challenging to make sure everyone on the team is aware of what the others are working on. So we don't duplicate efforts and share. So engineers B and C can learn from what engineer a has already learned. Do you have any strategies that you found helpful to to facilitate that communication in this type of environment?
Martha Ganesh:Well, I think it comes out of the management, I think that like, I could manage all of the engineers individually, or I could get them together every week, and we could talk about everybody's projects, the timelines of everything, and really just normalize transparency. I think, I think often people are worried to say anything, because they will hurt somebody else's feelings. And I, I think that if you just normalize that the people are separate from the projects, and drive that communication much, much earlier. And consistently, I think that it wouldn't be sad if engineer told engineer B what was wrong with his or her design, like it's just expected, and then they can correct for it, because I think we get very hyper focused on whatever we're working on, and we can't see how to improve it because it's our baby. Yeah.
Aaron Moncur:I recently read a book called creative selection inside Apple's design process during the golden age of Steve Jobs. And it was written by this apple programmer. And in the book, he quotes another highly regarded programmer, I can't remember his name. But this this gentleman said, premature optimization is the root of all evil. And maybe he was overstating his opinion, a little bit there. But the point I think, is well taken. as something I've suggested to team members in the past is that in the early stages of development, it's not super useful to spend a lot of time on design for manufacturability. And getting all the details worked out, you know for exam Adding draft to all the surfaces of an injection molded part or something like that, because things are so often changing still at this early stage of the project and detailing everything out. It's just a waste of time. Yeah, the argument that I've received in response from from people is that well, it is useful to do this this refinement, because there's no point in designing something that can't be manufactured. And that's the, you know, the DFM details need to be worked out to ensure that the part is manufacturable. I'm curious, where where do you stand on on that topic?
Martha Ganesh:I think that I think that you have to leave that creative space for people to have bad ideas, because sometimes they turn into really great ideas. And when they turn into a really great idea, we're gonna steal them from your office and make them manufacturable. Yeah, but I think I think having that involvement of manufacturing, really early on, sort of helps weed that out. Like if someone in manufacturing is making your sort of more developed prototypes, it naturally happens, you don't have to necessarily have that conflict in that argument. But if you're at the point where you're ordering a mold, yeah, you better consider whether or not it's manufacturable. Because even those prototype molds, often love to make their way into manufacturing. But if you're just gluing stuff together on a benchtop, or drawing something like yeah, don't don't spend that time but, but if you can start as soon as you have, you know, met your scope, it improves the timelines for everyone, you You shouldn't totally finalize your design and tell everyone you're done and then decide how to make it, you're just going to waste everyone's time. Especially in a regulated environment, if you've, if you've done all of your regulatory submissions based off of something that's not manufacturable, you don't really have clearance. Yeah.
Aaron Moncur:Well, I'm going to switch gears a little bit you you recently went back to school to earn an MBA, can you share a little bit about what prompted you to do so and what you've gained by by earning that MBA?
Martha Ganesh:Sure. Um, I wouldn't say I recently went back to school, I would say I recently finished and,
Aaron Moncur:okay, thank you clarifying that, yes.
Martha Ganesh:And what I decided to do is get my MBA before it was used as a reason to exclude me from career development. And where I was in my career, I didn't really need it, but I definitely wanted the company to pay for all of it. And I found that if I took one semester, a year, then I could do it without, without any out of pocket expenditure. And I ended up leaving the company before my last semester, so I had to pay for one semester, which is very sad to my financial goals. But um, I started early, I started early, and I made the time and I definitely appreciated getting my MBA, after having so many years in industry under my belt, it made me have much more context to some of the work than some of the other students. But But I, I was trying to prevent there any be any reason for not being promoted to the next position when I was ready to be promoted to the next position?
Aaron Moncur:You're building capacity in yourself?
Martha Ganesh:Yeah. When when I had the time to, I think, I think if there was this really great job, and I had applied for it, and they're like, well, you don't have an MBA, and then I ruined my life for the next 18 months and got one and then, you know, there's some other job that that didn't need it, then I just wanted it out of the way. And I wanted to do it on my terms. And and so it actually took me longer to get my MBA than my, my engineering degree, but it was because I didn't want to pay for
Aaron Moncur:that. You mentioned that having the an MBA allowed you to have different or more useful context, then maybe some of the team members that didn't have the MBA. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What does that mean?
Martha Ganesh:I met the other students that were in the MBA program. I think that the ones that jumped straight from their engineering degree to work on their MBA sort of didn't have the frame of reference of what managing of multimillion dollar project look like and where I had that experience and I could come in and, and sort of fine tune the skills I had, I wasn't learning the basics. I was polishing what I had.
Aaron Moncur:No, having the piece of paper right that says I have an MBA, that's of course useful because, you know, politics are what they are in perception. Beyond just, you know, formally being able to put that on your business card. How Helpful Have you found it to be practically speaking in, in your job?
Martha Ganesh:I think it helped me understand some of them management things and management decisions. And definitely, the accounting piece helped me understand maybe why some financial decisions would be made and, and what the top line and bottom line and why sort of companies will make these wacky decisions based off of some other influence where, you know, before I could just look at it from my project management, engineering frame of reference and say, that is a stupid plan. But there were all these other business reasons that it helped me understand why other functions behave how they behave. Sure.
Aaron Moncur:Tell me a little bit about what your day to day is like, as director of operations, you know, what are what are some of the common challenges that you have? What do you spend your time doing is director of operations.
Martha Ganesh:So, as director of operations, I think my biggest deliverable is the production output. So overseeing the production schedule, the production resources, and then making sure we're growing the business appropriately to meet those those demands. So you know, foreseeing fluctuations in demand, and building the equipment and hiring the people, and then even the, you know, four or five year plan of we need a new building, and we need this much space. And so really understanding the business plans and making sure that we're ahead of that curve, but, but not so far ahead of the curve, that we're wasting money, like, it would be the easiest thing in the world to hire 50 extra people and double double the raw materials and, and that just puts us in a not flexible position to respond to market demands, like, I don't know, say a pandemic comes along, and one of the side effects is a stroke, and you have to Super scale up production, you might be scaling it in a direction that you hadn't planned. And so having that flexibility in the raw material, and equipment and resources is mostly what I spend my time doing. But I'm also responsible for all of the new product introduction into manufacturing. And so making sure we have the capacity and the skill set to help men r&d, make their design manufacturable much sooner.
Aaron Moncur:What are some tools that you wish your r&d group had, that would make it easier for them to design and develop and test,
Martha Ganesh:I would really like for them to be more organized. I think it's very easy to grab whatever thing off of whatever shelf and glue it together and call it a prototype. And I think that you lose track of what those things were. And so you lose a lot of time recreating the thing you already successfully made. And so maybe being more tied to a engineering notebook, and just sort of jotting down things as they're going along will will give you a much better frame of reference for when you think you're getting close to being done. Because I think if you're working on 567 prototypes, and you get one that's perfect, and then can't figure out what you glued together. It's not really that useful.
Aaron Moncur:Right? Yeah, that's not an ideal situation.
Martha Ganesh:Yeah. So take notes, and clean off your workbench. But
Aaron Moncur:I can tell you, you're not speaking from experience at all right now. No, not at all. Well, Martha, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. It's been just delightful being able to talk to you. Before I let you go. How can people get ahold of you?
Martha Ganesh:I can be reached on LinkedIn. I think that's the best way. I don't think there's many Martha connections. So I think they'll be able to find me.
Aaron Moncur:Perfect. All right. Is there anything that I should have asked you that I haven't?
Martha Ganesh:Okay, I have the best interview question for engineers, right? Yeah. Ask them if they've ever dug a hole.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, this is already blowing my mind. Okay, I have to take a quick tangent here. I listened to a podcast with Seth Godin earlier this morning. And he was talking about creating tension and then releasing that tension in the context of telling stories and you know, being a public speaker and captivating people's attention. You have just grabbed my attention. Ask them if they've ever dug a hole. Tell me more about that.
Martha Ganesh:Well, it's not very clear. And so in the interview, you can find out if people will ask follow up questions, because often I'll be running around the building, I'll say something I didn't say enough words. And so I need someone to say, I don't know what you mean, because there's an actual physical hole, and there's a metaphorical hole. And so a, it finds people who will ask the question, like, kind of an awkward question, but also to I often there, I'm looking for the answer around the physical hole, because there's some engineers who have only gone to school. And there's some engineers that have done things, and I need engineers who have done things. And so holes are never easy. There's always routes and always rocks and always sprinkler lines. And so you get to see in that one question, if they'll continue to problem solve, and what was the solution and how did it go? But I did learn a couple years ago, when I was scaling up a team in India that that question means nothing to engineers in India, because they hire people to dig their hole. So I had to change my answer, but, but I think that finding a really great interview question that actually gets to the root of what you want how the root no pun intended, no pun intended. Um, have you left your house? Can you do anything practical? Will you ask me if I say something stupid? Like, it sort of answers all of those things? pretty quickly.
Aaron Moncur:That's terrific. That's terrific. Well, thank you for sharing that one. That's a gem. Martha, it's been so nice talking with you. Until next time on The being an engineer podcast. Thanks. I'm Aaron Moncure, founder of pipeline design, and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a positive review. It really helps other people find the show. To learn how your engineering team can leverage our team's expertise in developing turnkey custom test fixtures, automated equipment and product design, visit us at test fixture design.com Thanks for listening.
