Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E36 Tessa Axsom | Casting, Metallurgy, & Finishing with Fictiv
Tessa Axsom blends deep mechanical engineering know‑how with the craft of product marketing. Today she serves as Product Marketing Manager – CNC at Fictiv, the on‑demand manufacturing partner known for its robust CNC resources and design guides. In this role, she translates shop‑floor realities into crisp messages, actionable guidance, and programs that help engineers build better parts faster. Before moving into marketing, Tessa wrote extensively for Fictiv’s Resource Center, authoring practical articles on topics like drawing best practices, corrosion vs. oxidation, and developing people skills as an engineer.
Her path began at Purdue University in mechanical engineering and wound through metallurgy and aerospace, including design of aluminum plate‑and‑fin heat exchangers and quality leadership in chemical analysis labs. That blend of materials, design, and operations experience anchors her marketing perspective in real constraints: tolerances, surface finish, manufacturability, and supplier capability—especially in CNC machining.
Beyond the written word, Tessa shows up as an educator and voice in the community. Fictiv has featured her in webinars and industry conversations, from manufacturing complex designs to commentary on timely topics. She also runs Precision Pen & Quality, where she applies engineering rigor to technical communication and consulting.
Across all of it, Tessa advocates for a simple idea: engineers who can communicate—who can frame tradeoffs, tell a crisp story, and align stakeholders—ship better products. That’s why her work on people skills for engineers resonates so strongly with our audience of builders and problem‑solvers.
LINKS:
Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessa-axsom/
Guest website: https://www.fictiv.com/
Email: tessa.axsom@fictiv.com
Aaron Moncur, host
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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
Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we're thrilled to welcome Tessa Axsom to the show, a mechanical engineer trained at Purdue University, Tessa is the Product Marketing Manager for CNC at fictive where she connects hands on engineering with clear, practical guidance for manufacturing teams. Tessa has experience in metallurgy, with aerospace, heat exchanger design, design, engineering consulting, metal finishing and quality management, using her passion for sharing complex engineering principles and easy to understand ways. Tessa leads go to market, product releases, technical problems, problem solving and education for CNC. Tessa, welcome to the show.
Tessa Axsom:Hi. It's great to be here.
Aaron Moncur:So tell us a little bit about how you decided to become an engineer?
Tessa Axsom:Yeah, so I thank you. I found out at a young age, in my teens, that I had a passion for physics and math, and so I kept trying to find things that would kind of fulfill that passion, and my desire to solve problems and engineering seemed like a good fit. I started out in Biomedical Engineering and quickly pivoted to mechanical engineering because the dissections were for me. So I finished out my engineering career. Sorry, my engineering schooling in 2015 and I've loved it ever since Nice.
Aaron Moncur:So you mentioned that growing up you had a passion for like, physics and math and problem solving. Was there ever a project that you did, like, as a kid, or, you know, a young adult, even, that stood out to you as like, oh yeah. This is really fun. This is what I would like to do for a job someday. Yeah.
Tessa Axsom:So I remember visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with my family as a child, and I just fell in love with aerospace and it became a lifelong fascination. So I I still have the home video, and you could see me on there trying to explain some of the stuff to my parents, and they're walking with, you know, six year old me, and I'm like, This is why it's so aerodynamic. You know? I just really, yeah, I lacked onto it. I had books and all that stuff in my room growing up. So, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that's awesome. I remember when I was in college and I learned how a hydrofoil works, like an airplane wing or airfoil. And I was trying to explain, like the velocity going over the top versus the velocity going on the bottom, and that's how lift occurs to it was a roommate or something, and his eyes were just glossing over. And at some point I realized, oh, he doesn't care.
Tessa Axsom:Yes, I've had a few of those conversations,
Aaron Moncur:all right. Well, you work at fictive now, and I want to get into that tell us a little bit about the company, fictive, and what you do there, what sets them apart from others in the industry. Just give us an overview of fictive.
Tessa Axsom:So at fictive, we are enabling product innovators to create in a really simple way. So our goal is to allow even the non experienced innovators all the way up to the big fortune 500 companies, the ability to simply source their custom mechanical parts and assemblies now. So we recently became a part of the Misumi group, which gives us an even bigger global presence, along with our four manufacturing regions. So we are in the US, Mexico, China and India. And what we do is more than just make parts for our customers, though we support them throughout the full product development life cycle from prototyping to production, and we provide guided expertise along the way, such as design for manufacturability, guidance, finishing selection, even we support testing, we support cosmetic design, and we just really do help Our customers so things like bond consolidation cost downs, as well as supply chain management. Supply chain is such a nightmare I would not want to do that as my job, but we simplify it for our customers, and we really just are there at every step of the way to try to make the process smoother.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, there were a few things you said there that I wasn't aware of. Let's start with assembly. What? What level of assembly is fictive supporting?
Tessa Axsom:So right now, I do anywhere from hardware installation, so we do helicoil installation, for example. We're currently undergoing some processes to add welding to our suite. Of capabilities, so watch out for that to be formally released. We're going through the process introduction for that right now. We have a few of our customers in the robotics industry who we do sub assemblies for, and then we actually coordinate and allow them to have better relationships with larger contract manufacturers. So we're actually helping them to get the overall assembly of these robotics systems completed and facilitate those relationships and the supply chain issues that just inevitably come when you're working with a fortune 500 contract manufacturer. It's complex, right? So, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:fantastic. The other thing I wanted to touch on is testing. You mentioned some support in the area of testing. What? What all are you doing there? Yes.
Tessa Axsom:So at fictive, we actually have access to a huge global network of test labs. And right now, for example, I'm working with a customer to do some finishing testing. So salt spray, corrosion resistance, some wear testing. As well as we can do, we can facilitate, you know, sending parts to a test lab for the verification testing, as well as internally, we have a pretty robust quality control and quality assurance system set up for customers, so we can do a lot of testing in house at our manufacturing facilities, like CMM inspection. We can do, you know, Gage checks, stress analyzes, tensile testing, all of that hardness testing. So we have a large metallurgical capability set, I would say that we can offer our customers as well. Terrific.
Aaron Moncur:That's awesome. Tell us a little bit about your role there. What's your day to day like?
Tessa Axsom:Well, my day to day is never the same, you know, as startup, which I wouldn't really call us a startup anymore. We're a well established company, but we all still really just have a passion for helping our customers so and the company. It's it's an amazing culture here. It's so great. Like, if there's a problem that one of our customers is facing, we all just jump in and try to help with it. So if a customer comes to us and they say, Ah, I am so frustrated with my current supplier, and this is why everyone on the team wants to jump in and help solve those problems for them. And it's that passion that we all have. So as you mentioned, I have a passion for finishing, and so I am often called to help out with problems that our customers are having with finishing or selection or testing, as far as those go. And then my day to day responsibility is for product marketing. So what that means at fictive is it? It means bridging the gap between what sales is asking for so what the customers are asking for from us, capability wise. So do they need new processes? Do they need new materials? Are there advancements in these areas that they're really needing someone to help champion for them, and then also what our platform team is doing? So they're constantly evolving our fictive.com platform, and they're constantly looking at ways to simplify sourcing for our customers, so just taking both of those things to the market and then ensuring that our sales team is enabled to be able to go out and to solve these problems for customers, and to be able to really ensure that they get the full picture of what capabilities and services we offer,
Aaron Moncur:if you can think of one, is there an example or short story that you can share where you were involved in illustrating some of the points that that you just talked about? Sure.
Tessa Axsom:So which, which point do you think would be better? Which point are you the most interested in?
Aaron Moncur:I guess, like translating a user need into a new process or capability that fictive offers.
Tessa Axsom:Okay? So about for for a few years now, fictive has been on a path to really go from just a prototype shop to a production level supplier. So as part of that, we have been seeing larger and larger long term agreements, or, you know, collaboration with customers, where fictive is looking at taking on parts that are CNC machined, and our customers are saying, How can we make these more lightweight? How can we make these more affordably, right? Because it does come down to cost a lot of the time, and we don't like to hear that as engineers, but it's true. So one of the things that we were asked about is die casting, and we have had. So many customers come to us and say, you know, it's very difficult to source castings, especially domestically, right? That's always a challenge. And then if you go overseas, it's challenging because facilitating those relationships with the casting suppliers, with the language barrier and without being there on site, and you know, a lot of engineers don't have experience, or they're not taught how to do castings in school, right? So it's not something that's widely shared. So we decided to offer casting as a capability about a little over a year and a half ago, and since then, we've had a lot of success with our customers who come to us seeking weight reductions and new materials that they can try and cost reductions as well. And so we actually offer now a really cool set of guided expertise, processes and services, along with our casting capability like mold flow analysis, and we actually help customers to design the molds for the cast parts, which is crazy. And we offer a really good set of design for manufacturability feedback, so we have that casting expertise in house to help support our customers. And then we also offer finishing guidance. So that's where I come in, and I've worked with several customers on finding the right finishing for their cast parts. It's a different beast, right?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's awesome. That's great. Going back to your career, pre fictive, you had some pretty you have some pretty robust engineering experience, I mean, designing aerospace heat exchangers and working in metallurgy and finishing, how has that background that that set of capabilities and experience informed or helped you succeed in your product marketing manager role?
Tessa Axsom:Yeah, so it's really helpful to understand and anticipate what the needs of our customers are, right? So I've been there, I can understand their pain points and their frustration when they're trying to source custom mechanicals. It is very challenging, and it's especially challenging when you work for a smaller company and you're expected to go find raw materials yourself, or you're expected to go source, you know, manufacturers or machine shops who can do these things or get quotes. And it's so challenging. I remember waiting weeks for quotes, and I remember not even getting quotes, or people kind of laughing whenever I told them I needed 50 parts a year. You know, they're like, we don't even pick up the phone for that. So really going to fictive and seeing how passionate our founders are about making really sourcing hardware easy, it's just been like a breath of fresh air, and it's something that I really, on a personal level, enjoy, and I really value our mission to do these things. So I've designed inventions before, and I've stopped because I couldn't get them manufactured, like I did not have the capital investment to, you know, buy an annual supply of these parts, and I couldn't get any traction with anyone because I was just me, you still at my old consulting firm. So really, just having that experience and celebrating the failures that I've had in my career, because we've all failed, and trying to anticipate how we can set up capabilities and processes to help those young engineers, especially not have those failures, like, let's not gatekeeper secrets. Let's share them. Let's let's find ways to actually engineer things that make an impact and change the world for the better. And that's why I feel so good about working for fictive
Aaron Moncur:I love that. One of my big things is for the design engineers who are out there, of which I was one many years ago. You're constantly designing new things, right? New parts, new widgets, devices, machines, and the world is a big place, and there's been a lot of design that's been going on for a long time, and chances are someone out there has already designed the solution that you're in the middle of designing, and wouldn't it be great if we could just share all of that somehow, this magical platform right where you can type in with AI, maybe this starts to get more feasible, actually, but just type in the thing that you're trying to design and burp. There's a list of designs that other people have done in the past that gets tricky with confidentiality and IP and things like that, obviously, but I have always thought that probably 90% of the time, something that I was designing has already been designed, and I'm just reinventing the wheel here, which is fun for engineers, but not necessarily like the most profitable way to to. On a business anyway, something that you talk about is, is people skills for for engineers, and what do you think is the the soft skill, so to speak, that, or the like behavioral change that that gives the biggest ROI on career growth for engineers,
Tessa Axsom:I would say, understanding how to be confident but humble at the same time. So humility is so important in engineering. And I think some of the you know, senior engineers and mentors that I've had that I really have learned so much from have been so incredibly skilled, but so humble. And one of them who I actually credit a lot of my metallurgical knowledge to, was a gentleman who served in World War Two. And this guy was phenomenal. Okay, he was operating on in the battlefields in Germany, like in a tent, and he still came to work when he was 92 because he just loved metallurgy. And I got to learn a lot from him about aluminum vacuum raising, you know, and that just really, it was so amazing. And he was so humble. This man had, like, so many patents, and, I mean, he was incredible, because he was so humble. And just seeing that. You know, in the industry, you think of engineers sometimes as being a little arrogant. You know, it's but that doesn't have to be the way, like, let's work together. Let's try to solve problems. I don't know everything. There's no way. And I know that I could work with a team and really solve things, and that's what you find. It fictive, is a lot of really humble, really smart people who just love to help our customers and each other. So it's a great environment for that,
Aaron Moncur:in your role right now, in a marketing role, you you facilitate or or help with storytelling. And engineers might hear that and think, Well, storytelling, what does that have to do with me? Like, I don't care about storytelling. I just need to crunch numbers and design things in CAD but really, we're all selling something at some point, right? Maybe it's we're trying to sell, quote, unquote, sell our design to management to get approval, to move forward to the next phase, or things like that. Can you give us a kind of a concise like workflow or template for how you create a new story that you're pitching to someone,
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Tessa Axsom:Yeah, so I think first of all, the first thing that you need before you can really tell a good story to sell something is you need to put yourself in the place of whoever you're selling the story to, right? So I'll use the example of maybe a manufacturing engineer on the production floor, and you're trying to sell them on a process improvement, right? So let's first evaluate the pain points. So what is going on? What is the problem that you're seeing that you want to fix, and how does that impact them? You know, is it CPQ? Are they wasting a lot of money on poor quality? Is it not meeting customer deadlines? You know, Are we late on all of our shipments? What? What are the issues that are really affecting them, and then outlining how, exactly how your solution fixes those problems. So in marketing, we call it pain point marketing, or bottom of the funnel. Marketing is something that we use a lot as well. So it's really pain point solution. Pain point. How do we provide benefits to the customers to help them to not have that pain point anymore? So one of the pain points that we try to help out with our customers right now is that getting quotes is hard. It's so hard, and really getting that technical expertise is hard. So when you have Junior. Engineers who don't have this knowledge, where are they supposed to go to? I mean, they have internal mentors, but they're busy. So how can we help them to gain that knowledge that they need to be good design engineers, to get their designs right the first time? You know, that's definitely a lot, and then providing the return on the investment. So ROI is important, and it's even important whenever we go into marketing. So how much are we spending on this marketing campaign? How much do we expect it to benefit our customers, which is often, you know, not really tangible. You can't really define it. So it's a qualitative metric. But quantitatively, how many signups can we get from this? You know, how many orders do we expect to get from this? How many people open up an email? You know, those are all metrics that we're looking at from a marketing perspective. And it's actually very technical. I did not realize how technical marketing got until I got into marketing, and I was like, wow, this is a whole science, so you can't do that with your boss, but you could sit there and watch his or her facial expressions when you're pitching something, right? So you probably want a nice little good job or approval and sign off on your project, right?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that's great. Being behind the scenes at fictive I imagine that you have access to a lot of data about part costs and how DFM affects part cost. Are there areas where you regularly see designs coming through that there's room for improvement in terms of making them less costly from a manufacturing standpoint, because engineers have just over specked things, right? They've just too tight tolerances, whatever they are. But are there any trends or general patterns that you see commonly, that you can talk about?
Tessa Axsom:Yeah, I would say that over over tolerancing is a big thing. So if you are designing a pen to hold up a computer, you know, stand like does it really need a 10,000th of an inch tolerance on it? Probably not. It's okay if that has a little bit of vibration. But if you're designing a collector for a heat exchanger to go on an airplane, you need that tolerance, right? So it's really understanding the application of the parts. And I think that as engineers sometimes, or design engineers specifically, sometimes, we're scared, and we hear those horror stories of designs failing, and we hear about NTSB investigations, and we're like, oh my gosh, the rest of my life, I'm going to be held accountable for this design, so I have to over tolerance it. And you might look back at other drawings right for similar things at the company, and you might say, well, they toleranced it that way. So maybe that's what I need to do, but really doing physical testing and iterating and making sure that during that prototype phase, that's where you fail, right? It's okay to fail. That's part of the learning process. So many of our inventions have come about as failures, right? So many of the most successful inventions have come about as failures. So it's fine fail hard and fail fast, early and prototyping. Push those boundaries. See what is the maximum tolerance that you can actually achieve to make the part the most affordable. And then don't design in things that are complex if you don't need them to be there, right? So don't put sharp corners on something that's mating up to another part where you don't need a corner to, you know, make it snug, put in a chamfer or radius on that corner, because whenever you do sharp corners, you can't machine them with a typical CNC tool, right? You're going to have to wire EDM, cut that, or some other really complex process. That's a secondary operation. So really having an understanding of how CNC machining works, what the limitations are, is very critical in going back and designing. Because you can say, Oh, wow, that would be one setup on the CNC machine. But if I put that feature here, and if I made that other part here, that would be like five setups. So let me try to eliminate that. And then also, you know, ensuring that your finishing is actually well spec and well chosen for the application. So if you have something that's for a consumer product news and, you know, it needs to look pretty and fancy, yeah, that's fine. But if it's going on the interior of something, are you really needing, like, a special dye on anodizing, you know, like, Is that necessary? I don't know. So it's all trade off, definitely, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:when you were talking about doing things, because that's all how they've always been done. And maybe remember the story I heard years ago that I thought was so great. It was a man who he's cooking Turkey. Turkey, Thanksgiving turkey for his family, and he cuts it in half and cooks one half at a time, and then he cooks the other half. And his wife says, Why would you do it that way? We've got this giant oven plenty of room. Why would you cook it one half at a time? And he says, Well, that's that's just how my mom always did it. That's how she taught me to do it. And he gets curious, and he calls his mom and says, Mom, why did you always cook the turkey half, one half at a time. She says, because her oven was too small, it didn't fit right? So, like, just because that's how it's always That's the moral of the story. Just because that's how it's always been done doesn't mean that's the right way to do it. Yeah, let's talk about actually, before we go there, I want to talk about finishing but, but first you talked about how you know, if you move this one feature from here to there doesn't change the design intent, but maybe it makes it much easier to manufacture. It reduces the number of setups in machining, or whatever. Can engineers like, is there an applications engineer that the designers can call at fictive and be like, Hey, here's my design. I think this is good, but I'm not a CNC machinist. Can you help me make sure it's really optimized. Yeah.
Tessa Axsom:So what's really cool is our platform does help with design for manufacturability guidance. So whatever you upload a part to the fictive platform, you'll get instant DFM feedback from our AI. So we have a lot of computational engineers and software engineers who've worked tirelessly to code in DFM rules and guidelines to help to guide our customers. And then, if you have more questions, we do also offer DFM expertise in the form of real life humans. So I have some phenomenal colleagues who have spent, you know, decades in manufacturing, and they can look at drawings, and they can say, right away, hey, like, if you want to save money, don't do that, you know. So we're, we're not a design firm, we're not a consulting firm, but we do our best to help customers to really iterate on their designs and to really optimize them for manufacturability and cost.
Aaron Moncur:I'm curious to hear a little more about the AI that you have when a customer submits a part online, uploads a STEP file, whatever, and the AI takes a look at it. What kind of feedback can the AI give at this point, I'm assuming things like using a smaller cutter here, or a larger cutter, a bigger radius there, those things I've seen right around. Has the AI gotten more intelligent recently, and to what degree can it suggest changes that will improve part, costs, functionality, et cetera.
Tessa Axsom:So one of our cool recent advancements is our materials AI, and that can actually go in and look at a part and its intended function and help engineers choose the right material and finish for their parts, which are really complex things to do, right? So I went and I tried to write a guide on how to select materials. And I started looking through textbooks, and I was like, Oh, wow, this it, it requires a whole textbook. Like, you can't just, you can't just give someone a few pages and tell them how to select a material, right? It's really complex. So our materials AI actually simplifies that for customers. And then some more of the sophisticated capabilities of our AI design for manufacturability feedback would be things like the diameter to length ratio on holes, and then also things like the location of holes with respect to the edge, or the number of holes that are in an assembly or in a part, sorry, as well as, of course, the radius that you need on edges. You know, simple, more simple things like that. But our our software is getting smarter, and they're always making advancements and changes. But I think definitely the materials AI is probably the coolest thing that we've done recently and the most useful for junior design engineers. Yeah, that's really
Aaron Moncur:neat, and I'm sure it's only going to get better over time. How does the engineer communicate to fictives system what the design intent is? So the AI in the background understands the like the like the boundary conditions within which to recommend materials.
Tessa Axsom:So you can actually just type your problem in that you're having, and the AI will respond, and it will say, you know, if you're looking for something that's really good in corrosive environments, but is lightweight and cost frenzy, you should choose 6061, aluminum. Or if you're looking for something that is conductive, maybe cost isn't the biggest factor, but you're also looking for something esthetic, maybe like C 101, copper. So it's very intuitive as far as that is concerned, and it actually only references textbook. Provided data. So we have uploaded, you know, only reliable sources to the AI, so it can only ingest things like that, and then the computational geometry behind our platform was also only reliable sources. So you can actually trust our AI, right? Whereas I'm not entirely positive, but there's some concern that AI on the web is pulling data from non reliable sources, right? So, yeah, I feel very confident in our AI, but I'm not sure about the other sources out there, you know?
Aaron Moncur:So there's effectively an LLM behind your AI that's trained only on, like, textbook data. So, so we know it's reliable stuff, in as much as the textbooks are reliable, which, you know, we think they are right,
Tessa Axsom:yeah, they shall be peer reviewed, you know, yeah, written by experts in the field. So, yes, our, our our data that powers our AI is is reliable.
Aaron Moncur:Going back to suggestions that either AI or maybe a human, a team member at fictive make for designers, helping them with DFM, cost reduction, things like that. Any any stories that you can share that really stand out where a company, an engineer came to fictive and said, we've got this, this part. Maybe we want to make, you know, a large number of them and so small reductions in cost can overall make a big difference. But any stories like that where you can share some DFM or or design guidance from from fictive led to, like, a really meaningful outcome for the customer.
Tessa Axsom:So we had, we had a customer in the climate tech space, and they, they were having trouble sourcing a pretty complex assembly of parts. So the parts were, you know, all pretty complicated, and then the assembly was complicated, and we were actually able to introduce them to a molding process to reduce the number of line items in the bomb and to reduce all the manual labor that it took to assemble the components. And we've done this a lot for customers. So we have examples where we were able to help a customer in the med tech industry shorten the time to market. You know, from years to months. I mean, it's, it's a dramatic change once our team of experts get in there and help but this climate tech customer, if I remember correctly, they saw like a 70% reduction in cost for this bomb just with our bomb consolidation. Our cost down efforts here. So our global sourcing also helps a lot. Yes, it's huge. It's big. We've been able to really help a lot of customers. And right now we're helping some customers to redesign some of their CNC parts for die casting, and the weight reduction that they're seeing is like 30% you know? I mean, that's so vague, and the cost reduction is like 40% that's that's huge, right? Sometimes up to like 70% cost reduction, depending on the part. So, yeah, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:amazing. Wow. Okay, for engineers who are out there listening to this right now thinking to themselves, you know, I've been interested in getting into the marketing side of things. Any advice for them, skill sets that they should develop, books that they should read, podcasts, that they should listen to, anything you can share that might be helpful for facilitating that path. The Product Development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts, providing practical hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October, 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona, Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer, that's p, d, e, x, p, O, dot engineer.
Tessa Axsom:Yeah, so I think definitely the skill set that they need to be most interested or most made motivated in developing would be people skills. So those soft skills are so important in marketing. So, you know, marketers have to be good at marketing themselves, right? We're going to go to trade shows. We're going to have to speak to people. We can't sit behind a computer anymore in a dark room into our designing, right? So that's probably the most important. And then, as far as learning marketing, it is, it's complex, I would say, you know, I've, I've done a few courses. So there's the product marketing course. Courses I got certification in. So that was very helpful. And honestly, though, my biggest resources have been mentors that I've had. So my first boss in marketing was great. He taught me a lot of the technical aspects behind marketing and just really leaning in and being curious and asking questions. Marketing is very accepting. Actually, I found out they're a very accepting group of individuals, and they want to grow people who are more technically sound into good marketers. Yeah. So it's becoming more common to have technical marketing
Aaron Moncur:now, a lot of engineers are kind of introverts. I know I certainly consider myself an introvert doing things like like being a podcast host and and going to events and things. It doesn't come naturally to me. It's a skill that I've developed over the years, but it's not natural for me. My happy place is being alone in a quiet room, right? And I don't know if you were the same at all, but was there, like, some kind of development that that you had to go through, some growth, that you had to kind of push yourself through to get to a point where, where you had those people skills, where you were more comfortable going up and having conversations with people and just anything in that area,
Tessa Axsom:yeah, so I've always kind of pushed myself to, you know, I'm my own worst critic, right? It's so I, I tried to take all the opportunities that I could right out of school, to get in front of customers and to be able to make presentations, and I used to get really nervous, like I was not a good speaker, honestly, at all right, when I graduated from college, and just getting that exposure and just doing this time and time and time again has allowed me to gain the confidence that I need to be able to talk about some of these things, and I knew what I was talking about back then. It's not that I didn't It's just that I didn't know how to do it. So really taking the constructive criticism and the hopeful feedback from my mentors, I, like I said, I've just been really blessed to have some really good mentors in my career, and they helped me to learn how to talk to people and to learn how to take, you know, take it down a little bit on the technical information. Sometimes they'll say, talk to me like dumb kindergartner, you know? And I mean, it's fine, like it, people don't get offended, for the most part. And then whenever you do know your audience, that's also knowing your audience, like, if you're talking to a room full of business, people don't talk about metallurgical principles behind corrosion, like,
Aaron Moncur:don't, don't dynamics, yeah,
Tessa Axsom:airflow dynamics. Or, you know, like, don't talk about heat transfer rates. Don't do that. So just understanding your audience is probably the most important thing, and really considering that and writing things by someone else, like, honestly, my mom, she's had to learn so much about this stuff, because early on in my career, she was my sounding board. I would be like, Mom, does this make sense? She's a nurse, but she's also an engineer.
Aaron Moncur:Now, awesome. Honorary engineer. Honorary engineer. Yeah, you know, as you're talking, I started thinking about sports analogies. I'm not even a big sports fanatic myself, but I think the analogy is a good one. You know, if you're a baseball player or a basketball player or a hockey player, whatever, what do you do? You go to practice, you have a coach there who coaches you on what to do, and then you practice that thing over and over and over, right? You have coaching and you have repetitions. And I think it's the same formula for just about any skill that you want to learn, whether it's throwing free throws or becoming a effective public speaker,
Tessa Axsom:yeah, yeah. Or calculus. Like, how did you learn calculus? You probably had to do it a lot. I mean, linear algebra, you know, like, these are complex things, fluid mechanics. You know, that's usually a foul word in engineering,
Unknown:Fourier transforms, yeah? No, we don't want to do those things. Okay, the good news
Tessa Axsom:is that you probably won't have to. But, yeah, learning, learning by repetition, is, is important.
Aaron Moncur:Is there a, let's call it a micro skill that you can share with the listeners, and this is kind of wide open here, but drawing from your experience or background, is there some kind of micro skill, a phrase or like a ritual, or something that you have found helpful in your career, that that engineers can adopt and and start using right away in their jobs.
Tessa Axsom:Go back to your textbooks. Find your textbooks. Go back to them, reference them, reread them like actually use them. And if there's a skill set that you should be really focused on developing, it's material science. Understand how these materials work, understand how to use them. That is your secret weapon. As a design engineer, if you can understand materials, you will excel in your career tenfold amongst your peers. Like that is so critical. Just buy a material science textbook and don't stop reading it.
Aaron Moncur:Awesome, wonderful. All right. Well, Tessa, I think we can wrap things up now. This was excellent. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you'd like to hit on before we end the interview?
Tessa Axsom:So at fictive, we are passionate about teaching the next generation of engineers, and we want to provide our customers and non customers alike with a rich variety of technical resources that range from design for manufacturability guides for our manufacturing capabilities like CNC And injection molding, to material guides, engineering workflow tips, mechanical design tips, and even some reports on how the industry is performing. So if you have questions about how to design something, we have things like slip fit design guides or snap fit design guides, as well as how to choose the right materials for certain capabilities or certain applications. Those are all at our resource center at fictive.com/resources I think we can link it below.
Aaron Moncur:Too wonderful. And for engineers who might be listening to this thinking man, we talked about mentors and coaches, I think Tessa could be a great mentor for me. I've got some questions I'd love to ask her. How can engineers connect with you?
Tessa Axsom:Yeah, so they can email me at my effective email address, or connect with me on LinkedIn. Those are both really good sources. They check daily.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, wonderful. Well, Tessa, thank you so much again for being on the show today. What a delight it was to get to know you and a little bit more about fictive
Tessa Axsom:thank you so much for the opportunity.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, 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 and 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.
