Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E6 John Boezi | Universal Product Development Processes, Focusing on the One, & Consulting
In this episode, Aaron Moncur speaks with John Boezi about his journey as a product development expert, the importance of documentation in engineering, universal design principles, client relationship challenges, prototyping techniques, and building strong engineering teams. John shares insights from his experience across industries like medical devices, outdoor sports, and consumer goods.
We’re excited to explore his perspectives on engineering leadership, designing for niche and broad markets, and navigating the intersection of technical innovation and business strategy.
Main Topics:
- John's background and path to becoming an engineer
- The role of documentation in engineering
- Universal principles in the design process
- Defining problems and managing client expectations
- Prototyping tools and techniques
- Ingredients for successful engineering teams
- John's experience as a fractional Director of Engineering
- Balancing resources and creativity in engineering
- Strategies for staying inspired and motivated
About the guest: John Boezi, is a highly accomplished product development leader, mechanical engineer, and entrepreneur specializing in solving tough engineering challenges and turning ideas into impactful products. With a degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, John has dedicated his career to creating innovative solutions across industries such as medical devices, consumer goods, and outdoor sports equipment.
Through his company, Itri PD, LLC, John works as a Fractional Director of Engineering & Product Development, helping businesses of all sizes—from startups to established firms—achieve their goals by providing expertise in mechanical design, prototyping, and product strategy. His portfolio includes a diverse range of projects, from high-tech surgical devices to outdoor gear and hunting products, all driven by his passion for designing solutions that truly meet user needs.
John is also a champion of strong team cultures, believing that collaboration and creative problem-solving are the cornerstones of successful engineering. With over 15 years of experience, he combines technical know-how with entrepreneurial thinking to lead teams, refine processes, and bring complex products to market.
Links:
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
I think some engineers, when they get older, they want to have the autonomy to work for a few days and kind of say, Hey, I don't need to be checked on. But I think every time I've ever shown my work, even if I just explained it, then it got better. You.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we're joined by John Boezi, a product development expert and mechanical engineer with over 15 years of experience bringing innovative ideas to life as the founder of E tree, PD LLC. John specializes in designing cutting edge products across industries like medical devices, outdoor sports and consumer goods, all while fostering strong team cultures and solving complex engineering challenges. John, thank you so much for being a guest on the show today.
John Boezi:Happy to do and Aaron, how are you doing today,
Aaron Moncur:Excellent, excellent. So John and I have a little bit of history. Actually, years ago, we did some work together. John was generous enough to lend some of his time as a contract engineer for for pipeline, and we, I had a very positive experience working with him. He did excellent work. And from there, he kind of went off to do a few other adventures of his own. And we recently were able to reconnect, and here we are spending some time on the podcast, so excited to talk again, John and catch up and share some value with the listeners.
Unknown:Yeah, me as well, and I appreciate that opportunity when you gave it to me. I also had a great experience. And seems like you guys are being successful now, so love to see it
Aaron Moncur:awesome. Thank you. All right. So first question, why did you decide to become an engineer?
Unknown:I don't know if it was a decision so much as it's in my genes. There are a lot of engineers in my family, people who are either in construction, other trades, or in engineering. My family immigrated from, from Italy on my mother's side, and so a lot of people there use their hands to make a living. And we have some chemical engineers and some civil engineers and a lot of construction people. But for me, personally, when I was in high school, I got recruited to be in the Science Olympiad, which was a science competition for us, us nerds in high school, and I gravitated towards the building construction projects like the Rubik's Cube type stuff, or make a device to soften a landing of an egg so it doesn't crack, and so forth. And had a lot of fun doing those things. And we even got to go to a national competition in Colorado. Basically crystallized for me what an engineer was. And I was like, Okay, this is, this is what I want to do. You know, I'm not going to sit and had a computer all day and, you know, type in a spreadsheet. Let's, let's make some stuff. So that set me on the path to finding engineering schools and colleges. And I looked at mechanical engineering, went straight down the list and applied to all the top schools. And that's where, how I ended up in Georgia Tech and I make my home in Atlanta now. Nice,
Aaron Moncur:nice. I had similar experiences in high school. I remember the egg drop in our physics class and various other builds that we were challenged with when I got into engineering. I think one of the things I didn't appreciate was the documentation side of engineering. I love to build things and, you know, make prototypes work in CAD put things together. I don't love the documentation side of things. I'm curious, as you necessarily got into that side of engineering as well. Was that a surprise to you, or was it something that you were expecting?
Unknown:Certainly wasn't expecting it, but, and I think I probably resisted it at first, but now it's actually integral to my process, like my brain really wants to categorize and bucketize things, and I feel like the documentation process really lets me do that. I learned from an older engineer at one point early to have, like, kind of a slide deck open while I was doing work, and takes take screenshots and put them on different slides. And I felt like that made like a kind of like living Design History document for me. And I found that really useful in a lot of different ways. So since then, I found a lot of benefits in documenting things. And so I'm kind of on the other side of the spectrum,
Aaron Moncur:nice, nice. I definitely would not want to spend, you know, 24/7 just creating drawings. However, there is something that is especially beautiful about a drawing that's really well put together, or a document that's just really clear, and you can give it to someone and without any supplementary explanation, they can go off and do the thing, whether it's manufacture a part or complete a process, and I do find a certain degree of joy in a really well put together document.
Unknown:Yeah, I had a older engineer kind of give me a red line early on. And he was like, Hey, have you considered the visual weighting of where you have your views on this? And I was like, it just blew my. Mind, like, why would I even be considering that? But you wanted to aspire to have a beautiful drawing as well as one that was, you know, fully, fully dimension. I
Aaron Moncur:love that. Yeah, there is some art in it as well. You have quite a lot of different experience. There's medical devices, consumer products, outdoor products. Do you approach the design process differently when you're working on these these different areas, or is the design process kind of the same regardless of what type of product you're working on? Yeah, I
Unknown:personally think that design is pretty universal. I think that anyone who is designing and building something for someone else has there's a lot of commonalities, universal truths to that. I have a friend who's a golf course designer, and I feel like we can talk about, you know, sort of the same things. What are the what are the golfers want? How are we going to design the course, where it's going to meet them, but also meet their needs, but also be challenging? So I feel like there is a lot to that that's really, really, really universal. And for me, as a consultant, I spent a lot of times having a lot of projects where I didn't know what I was going to be working on. I didn't know the technology. And so you have to learn what it is, and you find that, yeah, there's some things that are really the same all way through. If you have a process that you follow, you know it can it can be successful for kind of all genres.
Aaron Moncur:What is your process? So let's say that I'm a new customer for you. I come to you, John, I've got this idea. Here's a back of a napkin sketch, and this is what, what I want your help with. What do you start and what are some of the concrete steps that you take throughout that development process to maximize the chances of successful outcome?
Unknown:Yeah. So my, my last stop, I was sort of building engineering department from the ground up, and so I made like guidelines and principles for the department, but I also made like a phase approach to how product development would work there. And famously, I think, you know, at least internally, famously, phase zero came to emerge, because I started at phase one, and then I realized it was actually this really critical step that happens at the beginning that I started calling phase zero. And that's really where you start to hit on some of the main specifications. Like a lot of times, clients will come to me and they haven't really even hashed out some really basic things that they're going to have to answer through the process and the journey. And if you can really, like, list those out and kind of have those conversations earlier on with people, you can be way more efficient with the process. So, you know, we would spend months, sometimes talking about, you know, an idea and whether it would work, where the product fit was, how much it would cost. So we knew how much we could spend. A lot of the basic things that you would need to eventually be in a spec document. So I like to really hash that state stuff out in the first phase. And then I feel like concept generation, refinement, you know, testing transfer to manufacturing, all those things are pretty like, generic, I think, from there on out. But you know, for me what, what's kind of integral to my process is really spending as much time up front, thinking ahead, so that we really know we can spend time on, like, being creative and generating a lot of concepts or testing, instead of hey, we went down this rabbit hole and we actually have to back out, because we realized that's a no go. We have to start all a new branch of design.
Aaron Moncur:I think defining the problem is is one of the most critical steps in the beginning of the development process. You already alluded to, that are there any strategies that you've used to like really robustly define what that problem is before you start trying to solve it.
Unknown:I'm not sure specifically, I'm a really user centric person, so I really try to explore, you know what? Who is this person, who's this targeted for? And I think a lot of companies make the mistake of trying to be as broad as possible, because they think that's going to give them the most chance of financial like success. But I think you actually are more successful when you can really zone in on a specific person with specific needs, and then really think about, how are they going to use the product, and if you get the chance to observe it, it's even better. I think that really is the genesis for a lot of the specifications and where the product's going to
Aaron Moncur:go. I like that idea a lot, as opposed to just thinking about a group, a user group, focusing on like a an individual. In fact, you hear that a lot in in sales and marketing, when you're trying to convey a story about how a product or a service is used, the most compelling stories are not the ones that are focused on a group. They're the ones that are focused on an individual, a person, a single person. I think there's this, this naturally stronger connection that we as humans feel with an individual when you can frame something within the context of a single person versus, you know this this society or this town of people, or this demographic group. So I like that idea a lot about just identifying a person to which you can to whom you can attribute these, these different characteristics and behaviors that you want to satisfy with your product. So you've worked on a lot of projects today, thinking back over the years, is there one or. Or two that was particularly challenging and or satisfying that you can share with us.
Unknown:You know, maybe not one in particular, but there's some themes across the projects that are really challenging, I think, to what we were just speaking to. When you have a project or a client that doesn't have a clear vision of what they're trying to do it can be really difficult, because, especially if it's subconscious, they don't realize that they're searching for a solution. And when you have somebody who's looking for results but really needs somebody to guide them through the search of what they what they need, what the solution is, whether it's a mechanical solution or really like, what is the customer base need and we need? What do we need to kind of embody with our product that can be really challenging, because you have some starts and stops and some hard conversations sometimes, and that's always difficult. It's like meeting people's expectations is always a real challenge, or can be really, really painful if you don't do it.
Aaron Moncur:Let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, I bet a lot of the people listening are working at companies and maybe don't have experience doing contract work, what are some of the tough conversations that you've had to have with clients around meeting expectations or otherwise? Yeah,
Unknown:I think the first conversation I have with people is almost always, how does this work? Right? Like, you know, how do you charge? What is the timing? Like, all those kind of things and and, you know, the answer is always unsatisfying, because it's like, well, what do you need? And like, can we flex to meet your needs? Because ultimately, this is a service based business. I think people are often wowed at how much money it takes to bring a hard goods product to market. It's not like software. You really have to be spending money upfront with with the risk of not sure if you're going to get that back. And a lot of people don't have the stomach for that, but it's nice to find and identify that customer. You know, just like with product people, you have to find your customer. Like with my business, I'm trying to find people who understand what product development is. Understand, you know that there's going to be some ups and downs. We're gonna have to spend some money on things that are not going to make it to market. But when you understand that, you can, you can do some really good things. And, you know, the people, people need hard goods, right? Like, we're always going to be interacting with the world, and it's not going to be a totally unless AI completely takes over and we're on the matrix, like, we're going to have to have tools that we physically interact with.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah, for sure, prototyping is always a big deal when you're working with hard goods product development. What are some of the core prototyping tools that you use, anything, maybe even something that's not as well known or commonly used, that you can share. I mean, like 3d printing, I think is kind of the standard one, but anything beyond that that you found to be particularly helpful?
Unknown:Yeah, you're right. 3d printing is ubiquitous. Now. There's so many different forms of it. I think some of the older ones are actually a little underrated. So like, you know, laser cutting some stuff sometimes can be really, really effective. I think making scale models too, it's like, hey, we make a lot of stuff. That's not the fidelity of the printers isn't really there. So scale it up two or three times and and see, like, what we do, a lot of mechanisms. And I think that's one where, like, you know, you can laser cut some parts out and see how some gears would maybe interact in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise. And so I think some of that, like, Lo Fi stuff, you know, even making stuff out of paper. And, like, you know, folder material, construction paper, or whatever, is always really, really helpful. When I worked at ingenuity works, we were co located with an industrial design firm, and those guys would get the pink foam out, and they would sculpt stuff. And I think that was also a there's something also about sculpting that's a little bit different than CAD work. You're using a different part of your brain, and you come to different, you know, conclusions by doing it, that,
Aaron Moncur:have you done any sculpting yourself? I
Unknown:don't really the pink foam when you when you cut it up, that stuff doesn't agree with me. So air quality gets pretty bad pretty quick. Got it okay? Yeah, I kind of, I haven't done that in a few years. Yeah. How about scaled
Aaron Moncur:models? You talked about that? What? What medium or media do you use for skilled models.
Unknown:Yeah, I'm mostly talking about 3d printing things at a bigger scale. I think we feel like, hey, we have to print exactly what's in our head. And then, you know, sometimes, you know my past work, you're, you're doing things that are five or 10 thousandths of an inch, and it's just not going to do that at a or it might print it, but it might break. And so you can still get a lot of benefit out of doing something at a one and a half or two times scale. I think it, it really helps to go from 2d to 3d and then 3d again to prototyping. Learn a lot from perspective change.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, great strategy. All right. Well, I'm going to take a short break here and share with the listeners that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Learn more at Team pipeline.us the podcast. Is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. Learn more at the wave. Dot engineer, and we're speaking with John boze today. So John, you've, you've talked about being passionate about creating teams with strong cultures and your experience, what, what are some of those key ingredients that go into a successful engineering team?
Unknown:Yeah, I'm, I'm someone who comes from team sports background, and I feel pretty strongly that the best work is done in teams. You know, like as someone who has been a contractor for many years, you know, it can be daunting to try to come up with game changing work by yourself, and, you know, your basement sometimes, and I feel like working with other people really can elevate your game. So, you know, I think that if, first and foremost, a good team is going to have, everyone's gonna have a growth mindset. They're they're gonna want to improve. They're going to want to learn new things. They're not going to be kind of like seeking status quo all the time. I think, I think that's how you have a high performing team, is everybody wants to keep growing and get better and look back at how they did things and implement new processes and efficiencies. I think beyond that to you, you all have to have a we win together mentality so that the best idea will win. I think if people get territorial or they they really want to have the validation of having their design or their feature make it into the design. I think that can be counterintuitive to making a great product that's ultimately trying to keep the user in mind, how is this? How is this best serving the user? And then another thing I think I really care a lot about is sharing work, right? So being collaborative, like every day would you work on today? You know, like, rather than, I think some engineers, when they get older, they want to have the autonomy to work for a few days and on their own and kind of say, Hey, I don't need to be checked on. But I think every time I've ever shown my work, even if I just explained it, then it got better. Like I was the guy who would get up from a test, walk up to the teacher to ask a question, and before I even got there, I realized the answer to my question, and I would go back and see and so I try to make sure that the teams that I'm on, you know, are generous with their time and they want to or see the value in sharing their work rather than
Aaron Moncur:hiring it. Yeah, there's a saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with the team. There are times when I have struggled transitioning to a team because I feel like I can do it by myself so much faster. Do you ever struggle with that paradigm? And if so, how do you how do you get past that and and embrace the team
Unknown:environment? Yeah, I think all the interns out there probably know about that, because everybody wants to have interns, but then people often don't, you know, allocate the time to really resource the interns, and then they might be like, Oh, hey, I had an intern. It wasn't, was it that you didn't give them the time to really, kind of get the skills to really contribute to the team. So I think it's really a philosophy thing. You have to build it and bake it into your your timelining, if you're if you're a company that's moving 1000 miles an hour, you probably shouldn't worry about that so much. But if you have the ability to say, like, hey, like, let's take on some younger people, let's be developing them, you know, they can bring some really cool, fresh perspectives to things that can pay off in the long run, but you have to kind of create space for that stuff to happen nice.
Aaron Moncur:One of your roles is a fractional Director of Engineering. Can you explain a little bit about what that means? And then, what are some of the rewarding aspects of being a fractional Director of Engineering?
Unknown:Yeah, I think it's a it's kind of a new buzz term, like fractional people, right? You have fractional CFOs, you know? And I think what it really speaks to is, like people who have a lot of experience working with companies that are still growing, right? So maybe you're somebody who has a single product and it's been successful, and you want to turn it into a company, or, you know, you're, you're you're seeing some level of success yet, but you haven't grown to the level where you can have full time engineers, or maybe there's one you can't have a whole staff and a team and so forth. You can have these people come in, these fractional supporters, come in and guide you with their experience, and say, Hey, here's, here's what I would do, here's what I've done at a past company, and kind of really supercharge you. And maybe it's like, Hey, we're doing product development for six months. Development for six months, and we're going to go to market and we're going to be selling, we're not going to need product development. So you're really intensive with somebody for six months, and then they move on to another phase of the business where they're going to kind of be focused. And I think it's really great, because you you get this sense of helping people and, like, there's this phase of every company that they're all, they're all going to hit this. And so you get success and helping guide them to the next phase, and then you move on to the next company. So that's what I think of when I think of as fractional engineers, somebody can kind of come in and augment a team for the short term, help them get the next level, and then, you know, go on and kind of steer your expertise somewhere else. And
Aaron Moncur:is that something that you particularly. Really enjoy, as opposed to, like, I'm going to work at this company for 30 years, you know, just be there full time for the rest of my life as an engineer. It's
Unknown:funny, you bring that up because I recently realized that I have not been anywhere for 10 years before, you know, I I don't think it's by design. I think I thought I was going to have, you know, three jobs in my life, and now it feels like it's going to be like 10 or 12. But I don't know, maybe I get maybe I get bored easily, and I like new challenges or whatever, but yeah, the variety is definitely an appealing part of it to me, to work with more people and work on different projects and problems. That's, like, really exciting. I think when I was with with a medical company for a few years, I felt a little bit stagnant, because you do the two or three months of development, and then you're spending two years before that product comes to market, and you start another product, and that that wasn't the pace I was used
Aaron Moncur:to. Yeah, I had a similar experience before I started pipeline. I worked at engineering consultancy, and there was, I worked on several projects there, but there was one that really lasted most of my time there. I went on for about two and a half years, and it was a really cool project. It was a medical device, a gastroplasty device, very novel. Nothing like it out in the market. Lots of prototyping, r, d, CAD, word, fun stuff. Nevertheless, by the end of those two, two and a half years, I found myself getting kind of bored of the project, and that was one thing I realized, is that I kind of need to have new projects, new challenges coming up. Even if the work is still fun and challenging, it does tend to get stale. If I'm working on the same thing for that long, yeah. And if you're somebody
Unknown:who's growth minded like you got to change things to grow. And I think having new opportunities, new challenges, is one way to do it. No, I don't. I wasn't built for academia to, like, study one problem for five or 10 years and maybe never even develop anything out of it like that, validation of my work getting done, the closure of it, and then having people have it in their hands and seeing like, Oh, this is really cool. I'm glad that this, this exists. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. Amen, speaking of being growth minded. So you started your career as, you know, hands on engineer, doing the engineering work, and you still do a lot of that. You've also grown into an engineering leader. Was that always part of the plan? Or did you kind of just naturally fall into leadership?
Unknown:Yeah, I think I believed in in the kind of like, servant leadership, where it's like, you know, I'll do this, I'll take on this extra responsibility because it needs to be done, and I care about the people that are going to be affected by it. But I definitely remember, from the very beginning being frustrated, you know, at the beginning, you're a designer, right? You're like, you're doing maybe a component or something in a team, and, you know, you have a project lead, and then you grow into being a project lead, and maybe you're doing, like, more sophisticated systems within a bigger system. And, you know, you're getting more impact, and that's really great. You're like, oh, I have ideas about how this should work, rather than just kind of doing what's prescribed to me. And I think, you know, you go through the evolutions of that, maybe you're the architect. Then maybe you get to sort of set the specifications, or eventually set the vision. And so I think I have been gravitating to more and more complex problems, and every time you go up, you kind of are given a new type of problem. Like, I may not be in CAD for a month, but I'm really thinking about the product at a super high level, and that's still a problem solving experience that is stimulating.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. It's always been surprising to me how much a bootstrapped team can accomplish when they're forced to accomplish a lot with the small budget. You've worked with teams who have large budgets. You've worked with teams who have small budgets. I remember last year we did an event called PDX, and we had eight weeks to plan this event. And I thought we did a really terrific job. It was, it was definitely bootstrapped, but we planned everything we had, I don't know, 5560 people show up, and it was a great event. And I remember remarking to one of the other team members that helped me plan this event that, hey, if we're at a big company right now, I bet this would have been a committee of four people that spent six months, and we got it done in eight weeks, and I was really proud of that. What are some tips or pieces of advice that you can give to engineers who are working in a team where there aren't a lot of resources. They're kind of bootstrapped, and they have to, you know, do a lot with a little, yeah,
Unknown:that is tough. I went on a job interview at Apple once. I think it was going to be for the Apple Watch. They wouldn't tell me what it was, but one of the things that kind of stopped me up in the interview was like, they were asking me, Hey, how would you go about this, this and this? And, you know, my answer apparently wasn't satisfactory, because the answer was, you send all of your designs to the machine shop and they make all of them overnight for you. And I was like, that's just not how I that's not my experience. I've never had the resources to think like that. Some, you know, big shift of thinking I don't. I think when you're considering startup versus, like, kind of a bigger company, you got to figure out what you value in your experience as an engineer. And there's like, a lot of excitement and freedom that comes with being in a startup. And there's like trade offs where you're maybe going to have to bootstrap a bunch of things, and if your project doesn't work, you're maybe going to be out of a job and so forth. And then you can go work at a bigger company where they have a ton of resources. They might even have a mentor who can guide you through stuff. And there's a lot of safety with that, and maybe, like, a more assured, kind of slower curve, but you're going to get to where you're going. That's cool, too. I think people should have to figure out what they want. I'm somebody who really thrives and enjoys being challenged. And, like, not sure if I'm going to be able to make it happen, but then I do, and then I get that pride you were talking about was, like, Man, that was really, really satisfying. I worked really, really hard and I did something, and I'm really proud of it. And, like, that's, that's what gets me out of bed in the morning to go to work. So, you know, I think maybe it's almost not a it's a feature, not a bug, but there's, there's less resources, because you have to use your creativity to find new answers.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I remember a long time ago, there was a project where we were doing some reverse engineering, and the software that we were using was really expensive. It was like 20 grand for this reverse engineering software. We only had one license of it, and we realized that for this project we were doing, we really needed a second license, at least for a period of time in order to meet the deadline that that we had committed to. But it didn't make sense to spend another 20 grand on another license that we'd use for, you know, like two or three weeks and then probably not pick up again for another six months or a year, if that, you know, we might never need a second license. So what we did, which what was within the Terms of Use, I'll just put that out there right now so don't get in trouble, was, instead of spending 20 grand on another license, there was a free trial period, which was two weeks, or something like that. It would look at your, your, I don't know, your IP address, your motherboard or something, and it would know if it had been installed on on a laptop. So we just bought a second laptop for$1,500 and we put the license on with the trial period. And it was perfect. You know, we got what we needed to done for 1500 instead of 20 grand. And I love coming up with, you know, out of the box, what I like to think of as clever solutions, where you get what you need without spending a ton of money on it.
Unknown:Yeah, I like that. That's a good story. I think, I think you have to do really great work. You have to try to do really great right? And I think sometimes people will be like, Oh, well, this is a safe solution. I know it'll work. And you have to have, I think, the courage to kind of be like, well, let's, let's take a little gamble here and see if, if we can do a little bit better. And I think I was kind of hearing it, you know, in between the lines, there is, like a drive to kind of do something elegant, and not just, not just to have a solution, but have an elegant solution, or have one that you're like, This is clever, and I'm proud of it. I think there, there's a level of that within us engineers where we're like, we're not just trying to get the job done, we're also trying to get it done in a way that shows how smart we
Aaron Moncur:are. Definitely, yeah, yeah, totally. Are there any What do you do to stay hungry, to stay inspired to feed your creativity. Any, any you know, you like going for walks. Are there books that you read? Are there movies that you watch? Yeah,
Unknown:well, I love movies. That's, I think, how I shut my brain down. I think I found, yeah, walking is a great place for thinking. You know, driving the shower, that kind of, that kind of situation. I've been recently learning the piano, and I think that's another thing that can completely reset my mind. So I'm the type of person my I have my mind starts kicking in about 20 minutes after coffee in the morning, and I'm good for like, four hours of, you know, sprinting, and then then I start to kind of get a little bit scattered, I think, and that's where I know that about myself. I've kind of studied that enough to know that, like, that's when I go for a walk, that's where I might play the piano or something, and then I can come back again and have the second win in the afternoon. And I think beyond that, you got to be willing to try things you haven't done before. I To your point, like, I mean, I would build my own website, you know? Why ask someone else to do it? And if I don't try it first, that's another, I think engineering traits like, Well, I'm not going to pay somebody to do this plumber for me. I could just go to Home Depot and buy a bunch of tools, because I'm okay if I mess it up, if I mess it up, I'll call the plumber, which I was going to do anyways, and it's going to be the same price. So I might as well take a shot at getting it right on my own the first Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I think there's something to that, that desire to want to do something by yourself, and not that you're going to do it on your own forever, but at least start there, learn how to do it, and then you're so much more effective managing other people, right? If you know that it takes five hours to do this thing and your man. A team, and someone on your team has taken 20 hours to do it. You know that there's a problem, and you can step in and speak to it and intelligently.
Unknown:Yeah, I actually got into this sort of that way, like I first job out of school, I ended up taking, maybe not the best decision, but it was in a it was in like a factory kind of setting, and I kind of knew that's what I didn't want to do, but I had to go and experience and to know that, and I know, I started searching out product development almost immediately. And there was a job opening in Atlanta, and I called, and I wasn't applying. I was just wanted to know more about it. And, you know, the guy on the phone, Brian Van Heil, spoke for me, to me for like, an hour. I was very, very appreciative of that, but he was sort of like, yeah, like, you don't know how to do cats, so, you know, we can't hire you, but you sound like a great guy. So, you know, maybe, maybe go learn CAD and come back to us. And I was like, That's a great idea. So got a copy of creo, and I, you know, taught myself from a book how to how to do stuff. And I just started, like, modeling things that were around. And I just sent him some files one day. I was like, Hey, I've been working on it. What do you think? You know, give me some feedback. And he was like, actually, we have a huge we have a huge project that we just landed. I would love to have you come down and do you know, like, a three month contract if you're into that. And I was like, Absolutely, timing worked out great. But like, if I didn't have that, um, well, the push from him, first of all, thanks Brian. And second of all, that that like, hey, let's, let's try to figure it out on our own attitude. I probably wouldn't been in this.
Aaron Moncur:That's a terrific story. Thank you for sharing that. I love the aspect of this. This guy, Brian, sounds like he became kind of a mentor to you. He he wasn't paying you to go out and learn CAD, right? You took that upon yourself, took the initiative to learn CAD, and then went back and said, All right, now I have something of value. Maybe we can work together now, right? And I think a lot of times people look at it the other way there, you know, if you want me to learn something, well, you know, pay me to learn it, and then I'll give you the value. But I think sometimes that can work, but, but the situations in which you really have a lot more success and fulfillment are the ones where you take the initiative, you figure it out, and then then you go back, and actually, I think you can make more money doing that, doing it that way as
Unknown:well. Yeah. And if you've ever hired somebody, you know that, like the anxiety of, did I pick them? I'm picking the right person, right? Is this person really invested in this? Are they going to leave in a couple years? And so for me to kind of come and say, Hey, three months, I spent three months doing the thing you told me to I'm really bought into this, probably made it a lot easier for him to be like, This guy's passionate about it. Let's get a shot. I think there's a lot of stories of people doing that. I would recommend it. Hi,
Aaron Moncur:definitely one of the the strategies, if you can call it that to for me anyway, staying creative and and motivated is it might sound funny, but it's napping. I take power naps pretty regularly. I'd say a couple times a week. I'll just lie down, kind of like you in the morning. I'm great. You know, I can, I can fire on all cylinders all morning. But once it starts to get, you know, 1231 o'clock, 130 I start slowing down. And I found that I can just push through the the whole afternoon and probably work at like, you know, 60% or I can take 2030 minutes, lie down, take a quick power nap, and then get back up and probably work at 80 or 90% for for the rest of the day. Yeah, that's great.
Unknown:I was going to ask you how long so 20 to 30 minutes you feel like you can fall asleep and kind of hit that reset button and get back up. The best
Aaron Moncur:power naps for me are, I don't quite fall asleep, but I'm in this kind of limbo phase where I'm not, not really aware that I'm awake, but then the watch buzzes, the alarm goes off, whatever it is, and I realized I wasn't actually asleep. I was just in this kind of weird power down Limbo mode. But once I can get into that state, if I can, you know, spend 1015, 20 minutes there. It takes a few minutes to get into that state, but I feel so much better. Yeah, just much more productive after that. There's
Unknown:something about the brain just turning off for a minute. Yeah, it does. It does really do something chemically that that's really beneficial to your
Aaron Moncur:day, absolutely. Yeah, I encourage my team to take a nap during the day. I think that's a really effective thing to do. Yeah, yeah, not in the middle of a call. Well, let's see one more question theory, and then we'll wrap things up. What is one thing that you have done or seen to accelerate the speed of engineering?
Unknown:You know, this may not be an answer you're expecting, but I think I got some feedback about perfectionism and that, you know, I think I spend a lot of time, you know, especially towards the end, taking something that's probably pretty good and making it, trying to make it perfect, because I know it's eventually going to go out in the world. It's going to have my name on it. People are going to use it. It's not like software. I can just push an update, right? Like it's going to be living out there world. And I think part of it comes. An anxiety of like, total risk mitigation, whether it's the perfect product or the mechanism works flawlessly in all situations, and you're just it's just never going to happen. You have to kind of accept whatever the minimum. You know, minimum viable product is another software term, but I think it's a higher threshold than a hard good. But I think you have to know when well enough you know like you shouldn't be. You shouldn't let perfection stop you from moving moving forward and making progress. And I think that's a hard thing for a lot of engineers to embrace.
Aaron Moncur:I agree 100% I I know that I get frustrated sometimes with engineers who want to make it perfect. And you can spend whatever it is, 20 hours making something really, truly good enough. Or you can spend 100 hours making it perfect, and 99 times out of 100 it is not worth spending that extra 80% to get to perfection. Yeah.
Unknown:And it's nice to have other people that you trust that are not on the project to kind of look at that and get their their feedback on it. And you know, when something's ready, they sort of, they sort of say it's right, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:well, John, thank you so much for joining me today. Super fun conversation, and great to catch up with you again. Anything that we we haven't talked about yet, that you want to bring up before we end? No,
Unknown:I just, I just hope people are out there making great products. You know, don't put all the smartest people in software. You know, we need you in mechanical engineering as well. And we're all, we all have to use these things. So, you know, it'd be great if we, here at America, kept making great products. So, yeah, you know, you can, if anybody wants to reach out, I have a website, John boze.com, it's got some portfolio work, as well as how you can kind of get in touch with me. I'm also on LinkedIn people can can reach out and engage with me there, but yeah, I'm just hoping to continue to make great products. Have have fun working with good people and take on some some great challenges here in 2025 terrific.
Aaron Moncur:And I'll put links to your LinkedIn portfolio, your LinkedIn profile and your your website in the show notes, so folks can access them there. All right. Well, thank you so much again. John, yeah,
Unknown:I really enjoyed it. I appreciate the opportunity. I love that you have this podcast. We need more engineering content out there. That's, uh, that's good stuff.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron monkkirk, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
