Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S1E16 The Joys of Solving Really Hard Problems | Robert Whirley
When Robert’s professors during school had him and his classmates use simplified assumptions to teach engineering problem solving his response was always “but what if these assumptions aren’t true?” Robert Whirley has always wanted (and successfully done) to solve the hard problems. Join us as we hear about his experience working as an engineer in multiple industries and starting product development companies of his own.
Pipeline Design & Engineering partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, or automation equipment but don’t have the bandwidth or resources internally to develop that equipment. You can find us on the web at www.testfixturedesign.com and www.designtheproduct.com
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
Welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Our guest today is Robert Worley Robert has a bachelor's degree, a master's degree and a PhD in mechanical engineering. He has over 20 years of experience building teams and leading development within the cardiovascular medical device space and is currently the CEO of our Tarika where he and his team are developing a novel approach to the percutaneous closure of large bore vascular access. Robert, welcome to being an engineer.
Robert Whirley:Thank you, It's pleasure to be here.
Aaron Moncur:I would like to start off talking about our Tarika just briefly, in lay terms, you know, kind of dumb it down for us. Can you help us understand what what does it mean percutaneous closure of large bore vascular access?
Robert Whirley:Sure, that's, that's a long story for a pretty simple problem. In this day and age, a lot of vascular surgical procedures, and interventional cardiology procedures are done minimally invasively through catheters that are inserted in the groin, and run up in to the harder turn to the aorta to treat various pathologies. And some of those catheters are about the size of a standard writing peg. And so it leaves a pretty good sized hole in the artery when the procedure is finished. And today, there are challenges enclosing that hole that often end up requiring surgery. And we've developed a minimally invasive way to close the hole, so that at the end of the procedure, our device goes in and closes the hole. And then the patient is for teachers completed and the patient can go off to recovery without having a big groan.
Aaron Moncur:How interesting. Okay, thank you for for clarifying that. I'm going to kind of jump back towards the opposite end of the spectrum. Now, back to before you even started your career as an engineer, how did you decide that you wanted to become an engineer?
Robert Whirley:That's a really good question. I think all through high school I had a bent through for technical things and enjoyed building things and solving problems. And I had the opportunity at the end of my high school career to take an engineering position at the local Napl out of I grew up on the coast of Florida there. And the Navy had a facility got a summer internship there and the mechanical engineering department loved it. And as they say, never looked back. I went to engineering school in mechanical engineering from there and just love to fix things, love to find innovative solutions to problems. So it's, it's been a really fun trip.
Aaron Moncur:As a kid, where did you find yourself fixing things often? Maybe a bicycle or as you got older? A car? What? What did you do as a kid that maybe maybe gave your parents if not you an inkling that engineering might be in your future?
Robert Whirley:Aaron, I wonder if you got a sneak at the playbook somewhere. I did not tee you up on that. But when I was about 10, or 11 years old, I thought it would be really interesting to understand how long more work. So the entire lot more. Oh,
Aaron Moncur:I love it. I have to ask Did Did your parents know about this as it was going on?
Robert Whirley:They did not? Once the patient was on the operating 14 Fortunately, they had a good sense of humor and putting it back together took about five times as long but it will sure experience and I bet from there on I was hooked.
Aaron Moncur:That's phenomenal. I love that. That's I think that's like the quintessential story for so many budding engineers. Yeah.
Robert Whirley:You're welcome to learn more about the things that didn't work and you do the things that did?
Aaron Moncur:Absolutely. Sometimes people asked me, you know, young engineers were students, what's the best way to learn mechanical engineering? And I always say, go take something apart, you know, hopefully get your parents permission or whatever, but find something and just take it apart and see how it works inside. There's so much value in such a simple exercise.
Robert Whirley:Absolutely. And there's nothing that will give you insights as to opportunities for improvement so much as taking something apart and understanding how it was originally put together. And invariably you'll get insights as to how to improve it. And hopefully
Aaron Moncur:at the end of that process, you don't have any leftover nuts or screws? Yes, hopefully not, hopefully. But if you do, that's all part of the journey. Okay, you spent as far as I can tell a solid eight years going to school to acquire first a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree. And then a PhD. Most engineers will stop at a bachelor's and you know, some go to the masters level, very few go to the PhD level, what what was your motivation behind getting a PhD? And how has it helped you in your career?
Robert Whirley:You know, from the very beginning, I was always interested in the hardest problems. When in college, the professors would say, well, we assumed for this analysis for this formula, they were driving, we assumed this, my thought immediately was what if that isn't true? And I had no interest in some of the assumptions, I wanted to challenge every assumption. And so I gravitated early in my career to want to work on the hardest problems, the problems that didn't satisfy all the usual assumptions and my career's kind of gone that way. And I've always enjoyed, enjoy working on hard things. And someone once asked me, what, what did you find most interesting about being an engineer and being a product development? And I said, it's really cool. I get to work on things I don't know how to do. Who does I know how to do it, we give it to someone else? To do,
Aaron Moncur:right, a lot of fun. It's like, it's like walking towards the horizon, you're never going to get there right, the joys and the journey?
Robert Whirley:Absolutely. It's, it's an incredible journey. It is fun to see products come out the other end, though, I would say that early on, I found that I was not an academic, and that I needed more than just publishing a paper. Often for Fortune fortunate to publish quite a number of papers along the way. But I really like to build hardware and build a product and see in in seeing the user benefit from that product, and particularly in the healthcare space. So for me, there's a lot of joy in taking on a hard problem and seeing it all the way through all the way to the end for a solution.
Aaron Moncur:I agree there is something so almost magical about experiencing the process, in which you start with nothing but an idea, you know, it's some molecules and atoms in somebody's brain interacting in a way that causes a person to think of something new. And then you end up with this tangible physical thing that you can hold in your hands, and use to do some kind of productive work that that whole process is just I love it so much. It's It's magical. I don't have a better word for it than that.
Robert Whirley:It absolutely is magical. And then when you see the person go on to use the thing you created to treat a disease or solve a problem or create some unique value in the economy that hasn't been created over a disease that hasn't been treated before. It's it's incredibly rewarding. And we're fortunate to be a part of that ecosystem. Yeah, who, who
Aaron Moncur:needs LSD or hallucinogens, we've got engineering in our minds. Yeah. For for some of maybe the students out there, it's not often that, that I get a chance to speak with someone who's been through a Ph. D. program. Why? Why might a student decide to pursue or not pursue a PhD? What What are kind of some of the pros and cons surrounding that?
Robert Whirley:Yeah, for me, it was I really wanted the ability to confidently take on really hard problems, and feel that I had the resources to apply to those. I also enjoyed the outside confidence that comes and learn in a Ph. D. program. I think the most important thing you learn in a Ph. D. program is not the detailed subject of your thesis. Certainly not for most engineers, some scientists may disagree. But for most engineers, what you really do is you learn how to learn, and you learn how to learn quickly, in order to come up with the relevant new insights and inventions that you're going to need to solve the problem that you're doing for your PhD thesis. And so for me, that was the attraction. I always have enjoyed challenges and it was the the next challenge, and it gave me a great background and all the engineering fundamentals so I could quickly look at a problem and make assessments that certain approaches may work certain approaches clearly wouldn't work, just with a rough order of magnitude analysis. And I, at least speaking personally, when I will set, the bachelor's or even a master's level, I didn't have the command of the subject to be able to confidently go into those kinds of things. That said, I would certainly not say a PhD is for everyone. If you enjoy more the design side and less the technology side or less the analysis side, it not be the right thing for you. But it certainly was aligned well with my gifts and my interests. And it played out along the way, as I later got into being more of a full time entrepreneur, that it brings a credibility that when you're building teams and building businesses, it brings a credibility that also can open doors for
Aaron Moncur:I think that's a really helpful way to think about it, the distinction you made between design and that kind of analytical side of things. Okay. You, you've held a lot of different research r&d roles in your career, what tools have you seen being used over the years that have enhanced an engineering team's ability to perform research effectively? And what tools do you think maybe are still needed?
Robert Whirley:That's a very good question, Aaron. Well, let me go back to when I first got involved in medical devices, back in 1997, having spent time in automotive and aerospace and some other industries, and was fairly new to the medical device space, and I was looking for an opportunity and looking at a problem that I was interested in solving, and was interested in, as I learned about the medical device space, that some tools that were routine, in my tool belt just weren't used in that space. And I think the cross pollenization of you bringing tools from different industries, to a new problem area is really powerful, specifically, in my case, in the aerospace and defense sectors, extensive use of sophisticated computer simulation and nonlinear finite elements, and so on to as part of a design process, rather than something that you did at the end of the footnote, that was routinely because you can't go build a $200 million satellite and go try it and break it and see where it fails, and then build a new prototype next week, you had to get it right, the cost of the test was very expensive. And so when I got into medical devices, I was quite surprised to find that very little predictive engineering was done. And there was a lot of emphasis on hardware prototypes, and with the idea that it's not that expensive to build these prototypes. And I said, Yeah, it's not that expensive. But doing a clinical trial to evaluate them is really expensive. Right? So why in the world, are we not doing more work upfront to understand the performance potential and design optimization of these using some of these tools. And so I brought some of the tools that I've used in other industries into medical advice. And now these things are routine, but this was in 1997 1998, when it wasn't routine at all. And I think that allowed a lot of value creation. It enabled us in specifically, in in one company, to have confidence in the design, to invest millions of dollars to develop a new manufacturing process to make the very first prototype. And we never had the confidence to invest that kind of money without having some new tools to be confident we were going to like what we got out the other side. So that I think they're the intersection of technologies and bringing the cross pollenization and bringing new technologies to an industry offers some really interesting opportunities for by creation.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, absolutely. So FDA and computer simulation, they're pretty common these days. Do you have any thoughts about what what what are some tools that we still need as engineers that we maybe don't quite have yet?
Robert Whirley:Invest in the medtech space, we struggle for good anatomic representation so that we can use in the bench in the cardiovascular space? Sure. We have pumps now that represent cardiac flow, that representing good models represent portrayal tissue, for example, or models to represent the various structures support structures. The whole arteries in place. mechanical models for these are things that we have to develop almost on a case by case basis and our understanding of the mechanical properties, there is still very rudimentary. And there's huge opportunities. And I know you in in your career has gone a long way towards inventing new and developing insights and new ways to test devices. And that's another area of work. Combined, bringing new test insights into the field so that we can more rapidly evaluate designs, these are huge unmet needs. And
Aaron Moncur:that's so interesting to hear you say that you are not the first person that has mentioned that to me this need for better anatomical models. Very interesting there. Like you said, great opportunities in that space. Okay. You worked at at least one automotive company maybe to be earlier in your career, there's us electric car and, and trans motive technologies, which I'm not positive was an automotive company or not, but at least one of them us electric car based on the name was an electric car company. And, of course, they're all the craze these days. But what was what was the industry like back then? And did people envision the kind of consumer vehicles like Tesla that we have now? Or was the vision for the space much different back then?
Robert Whirley:Yeah, that was the one character that was in 1993. And well, some enthusiasts, I think, envisioned that personally owned electric vehicle, the real focus at that time, was the deployment of electric vehicles for fleets, because the average fund operator, even in those days, drove less than 25 miles a day on a vehicle. So even with 1993, battery technology that was well within the capability. And so what that company was looking to do, and I'm joined, it was my first real entrepreneurial venture, at that time, in the automotive space. And what they were looking to do was to create fleet vehicles using relatively low cost technology that can be deployed across things like the power company vehicles that drive around for meter readers, or the US Postal Service, for example, those little postal vehicles that we all see, in those days average less than 20 miles a day. So they're a great candidate. electrification, we have an electric bus program, and had some interesting technologies developed the first safety certified electric vehicle in the US. But in 1994, the administration changed and a lot of them federal mandates for the use of electric vehicles and fleets disappeared. And they were still more expensive than the gas powered alternatives. So our market really dried up out from under us. And that was a case we had a good technological solution. But factors beyond the control of the startup changed the market. And that was the end of that coming.
Aaron Moncur:I think solar dishes have suffered similar fates, when the price of oil dropped, and suddenly, you know, solar dishes were not. So we're not so heavily sought after.
Robert Whirley:Yeah, third, external effects that I think can can always play upon anyone in the startup or in the development stage venture. And that's why I always encourage people to don't let your the success of your product become a reflection of your success on the project, that those may be independent, you can have very good projects that don't go on to become commercial successes. And conversely, I've seen examples of very mediocre projects that became huge commercial successes, because they were in the right place at the right time.
Aaron Moncur:Very good. Very good. In 1998, you co founded try vascular and and looks like you raised about $20 million to do so. And you you later went on to raise even more in series and series B funding. How did you do that? I mean, maybe maybe you did have some VC experience back then. But how did you know like, how to approach a VC firm and what to say and and just how to get through that whole process.
Robert Whirley:We did not have experience I have two co founders that I work with at the time and Joe Humphrey and Mike Chota and we've all known each other. We're all grad students at Cal Tech together. And we've never raised any VC money. And we made all the mistakes. The how we figured out how to do it was we made all the mistakes and check them off. We came in with the with poor, being unprepared, our presentations were too long, they were unfocused. And then we had a lot of trouble, we probably had 30 projections. And we knew we had a good product idea that the Senate was sound. And we were showing images of the design concept and showing a lot of computer simulations that would explain how it worked, and showed the feasibility of this design. And we've got a lot of bobbing heads that said yet that looks very interesting. And then at the end, with the follow up would be, but it's not right. For us. It's too early, all the usual explanations. And funnily though, one of the best things we did was we started gathering it in our advisory group around us, people that had done this before. And we got an advisor, a gentleman by the name of Steve Weiss, who was an ex venture capitalist. And he said, In all three of us had come from aerospace, none of us had any medical device background. And he said, the medical device venture guys you're talking to aren't used to seeing all this technology stuff, they're used to seeing some hardware. So if you've got a branded shoe box with some hardware prototypes, really, if we have a clear definition of the problem, and we have this technology with these good simulations, building, the prototype isn't hard. And he said, Build, take Schubach building prototypes. So we took his advice. And the next meeting, we went to within about two weeks, we prototypes in the shoe box, probably limited, but we took them in and after we showed all the fancy graphics and what how we understood the problem and our general approach and the simulation results, we pulled out some prototypes and show them and things changed from there dramatically in a much more receptivity. So I really would put that at its root to we surrounded ourselves by people who had done what we were trying to do, and ask them questions and tried to take their advice.
Aaron Moncur:That's such a perfect example of how important it is to know what your customer wants. I mean, you guys had all this data and technology, and she could show exactly how this was going to solve a need. Which for you know, a lot of people probably would have been perfect, but these guys were looking for a prototype. That's what they wanted to see. And as soon as you met that need, as soon as you identified that, quote, unquote, customer requirement, boom, things changed. And that that actually is a perfect segue into another question I wanted to ask you at Troy, vascular, one of your roles was to ensure that the product met clinical needs. Now being engineers, at least in my experience, it's so easy for us to just want to jump into the design, you know, and start, you know, getting into CAD and doing some benchtop testing before we fully understand the customer's needs. How did you keep your team disciplined to avoid that pitfall? And what did your team do to ensure that the product they developed accurately met the market needs?
Robert Whirley:Oh, that's a great point. Great question. It has been one of my pet peeves from the very beginning. And one of my founding principles in engineering has been to focus on the problem, don't start with the solution. And specifically try vascular, we were working on a problem in aortic disease, specifically, the organ aneurysms. And the long and short of that without getting in the details of that involves making the seal inside the blood vessel above and below a weakened area. So you take the pressure. And we looked at the technologies that were used in a couple of other early devices. And they were stents, vascular stents and grafts, things that were already in use in other medical devices. And it looked like people that just got some of those components and put them in the middle of the table and said, Let's build a new device. And we're going to call it a stent graft. And he really was poorly suited for the application. engineers don't seal fluids using stands, which are nothing more than radio springs. But using radio springs and fabric engineer seal fluids with gaskets and O rings. And they've been doing that for 100 years. We didn't pioneer that. And so what we really brought to the problem was at its simplest terms, this is not so much a medical device. This is a fluids problem, where we need to cure have fluid at two ends of a two. And so if we need to do that, we need to figure out how to use gaskets and openings. And that was really the focus on the problem. And we brought that into the team. From the very beginning, we talked about using proven engineering principles and stay focused on the problem and pay no attention to how other people solve it. And actually, our company, in sharp contrast committee and other small companies of the day, we were probably seven years old. And we didn't have a single competitive device that solve the same problem anywhere in the building. Because we really didn't care how other people did it, we were focused on making sure we had solved the problem. Thirdly, to this day, many projects toyed around a firm believer in that
Aaron Moncur:I love how you broke that down. So simply gaskets and O rings, right? It doesn't get much more simple than that I'm sure that the solution eventually was was complex, but to be able to see it through the lens of these fundamental, you know, the basics. That's powerful.
Robert Whirley:That was exactly what our approach and I think that that clarity helps so often, because I think as engineers, we come into problems, and they're, they're complex, there's a lot of confusing bits of data and pieces, and so on, and really peeling all the details away and looking at, fundamentally, what's the physics that underlies the problem? And what's the right physics to use to solve that problem? I've always found is a great weathervane for which way to go which approach to follow to to solve this problem.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's take just a few seconds. Quick break here and remind the listeners that the the being an engineer podcast is powered by pipeline design and engineering, where we work with predominantly medical device engineering teams, who need turnkey custom test fixtures or automated equipment, to assemble, inspect, characterize or perform verification or validation testing on their devices. And you can find us at test fixture design.com. Robert, I'd like to jump back into try vascular, and there's just so much there to talk about. But one of the things I see that you did, and this, you've already brought this up, actually, I just want to dig into a little bit more. One of the things you did there was to develop this FPGA simulation, right for the for the stent design. And like you mentioned, that was back in 9798, when the simulation tools we have now are probably much less intuitive to use. So how did you use the process as a strategic tool for your business? And what efforts went into validating that that simulation process to make sure that the FDA results actually agreed with reality?
Robert Whirley:Well, that's a key aspect of it. We brought the technology and as I mentioned from aerospace experience, and then having done that, in the early days, I was doing that during the day, I was doing the usual r&d leadership activities. And then by night, I was in pounding the keys building models, running simulations, to see ultimately what can we learn from them. Because I'm also a big believer that technology doesn't really do any good unless it helps you make decisions in the product development process. So at the end of the day, having all the technology and all the plots and pre color pictures, it all comes down to what shape should it be? How thick should it be? What material should we make it out of? And if it can't help answer those questions, it's not adding value. Conversely, if it can help us answer those questions, it's adding a lot of value. And so that's that was what I focused on, bringing into the team. And then very quickly, we hired another gentleman I had known from previous work, who previously came out of Boeing aircraft, and had been using nonlinear simulation tools. at Boeing court, of course, that was a worker they practice and brought him into the medical device world that never worked in our space. We explained the problem that we wanted to solve just in mechanical engineering terms. And he immediately knew how to simulate that. And so we got into applying the tools to our particular medical device problems. But to your point of validating that we started small when I continue to advocate in a situation like that start byte size. In our case, we simulated just a stent, we would simulate the for example, the radio force as a function of diameter. Then we'd go measure that in the lab and see those to correlate And over a region or over a large diameter range. And if they don't refine the model, understand what's different. If they correlate, then take the next step and maybe add the next component. And so it's a step by step building process, not only to give you confidence in a simulation results, but that also gives you the insights to make design decisions as you come along. If you just jump in and make a very, very complex simulation, and then get a solution, you have no idea if it's right. And you're also not sure what were the important variables and decisions along the way that Nick gave you that answer. And it's often understanding of sensitivities, that it provides more insight and more value in the product development process, then point solution does. And so that I think that is one of the key takeaways in using that kind of technology is using it to understand design sensitivity that you can't possibly learn for prototype testing.
Aaron Moncur:During that time, where there are parties or individuals who saw you building these models, and then going to the lab and trying to validate them. Well, it's not quite right, let's go back and tweak the model. lab test again, that we needed another couple of iterations. Were there people seeing that? Who said, Why are you spending all this time building this model? We can just test it in the lab, and we have our answer. What was there any pushback like that? And if so, how did you deal with it?
Robert Whirley:We had some pushback, of course, but not a lot, because it was a company built by three aerospace guys.
Aaron Moncur:They trusted you if they saw the value,
Robert Whirley:the pushback we got was anytime you're venture funded, you're looking at the milestones and looking at how much money you have in the bank. And you know, you have to get from here to there. And so the pressure was largely self induced. But what we really did that, I think early on, was a departure from focusing just on the product with we took the simulation a step further to simulate how the product interacted with a tissue. So we could see, what would the tissue response be to a stent? Was there a danger that the device was going to damage the tissue, or caused some sort of inflammatory reaction, or conversely, where the force is so strong that the device wouldn't stay in place and move away from the intended location. And while measuring the force on a mechanical object easy to do on the prototype lab? Understanding the interaction between that device and tissue is not easy at all? And then when you might say, and what if I have a range of tissues, so it's diseased and sun is normal? Then people pretty quickly started to see the value of being able to assess that without having to go do a large clinical trial or a set of very complex studies.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. You've led a lot of r&d teams in your career, what are some strategies that you've found to be useful in in creating a productive team?
Robert Whirley:That's a great question. I think it really all boils down to people. I, my start in in that conversation with getting the right people, I look for absolute A players, I want strong people who have very solid technical backgrounds, who have a thirst to solve problems, thirst to create things of thirst to win. And it's a cliche that winners find a way to win. But in my experience, it's true. And so I start by getting those very best people I can. And I usually find if after you've got three or four, there's a critical mass, because good people like to work with good people. And as soon as you got the team, the first three or four players, that it starts to get a lot easier. But there's no task that is more important for a leader than building the right team.
Aaron Moncur:And how do you know that someone has this innate appetite for winning? I mean, is that something that that you think can be identified pretty quickly? Or does that just happen over, you know, six months or a year of working together?
Robert Whirley:No, I'm picky. It's not. There's no formula. It's not easy to tell that I'd say I think you can get insights by listening to someone's story of other projects they've been involved in. Some people have a long history of projects, none of which were successful, but they all had an excuse. And there were other people who have a history of projects that all have trouble but somehow they found the way and I looked for people of a second caliber that people that always found way to solve it there that we shouldn't have been able to figure this out. But we did. Whether it was we brainstormed a whole different physics based approach, or whether we just tried several things, or whether we did a very deep dive root cause investigation into why that previous approach wasn't working. And we found the root cause and fixed it and solve it. You look for someone who's just got that drive to win, because I think if you, if somebody's got the drive, we all run into obstacles. And we will find a way through them, there are solutions. It's just a matter of getting there. And so I look for that. And for that to work, you've got to have someone that's got the right technical foundations, someone with a weak technical background, in a product development role, they're just going to struggle, because they're going to spend time trying to do things that just aren't physically possible. And so we try to find people with a strong technical background and that thirst to win, and then put them in an environment where they're part of the team. And I use the word team is really overused, I think today, and I think like making them a part of the team by name, they have ownership for the milestone. And we give them a tremendous amount of empowerment, on how they want to approach it, what tools they want to use, what we trigger, what resource, what resources they need. And we find the right people really flourish in that environment.
Aaron Moncur:I love what you said about listening to an engineer stories, and it made me think, for all you engineers out there that are getting ready to interview, they're on the hunt for a job. I think it's so important to practice those stories, you know, like a professional athlete practices their craft, practice telling these stories so that when you're in front of an interviewer, you're not stumbling for the right word, you already have these stories that you've practiced, and they they flow, and you can really communicate your experience because otherwise, it's hard to kind of on the spot, come up with the right anecdote or the right story to demonstrate the value that you've brought to teams in the past.
Robert Whirley:I couldn't agree more. I think whether it's an interview situation, and you're telling the story of yourself, having thought through what are the key points, and what are some concrete stories from your past that you can share, that give someone insight into your capabilities and contributions you can bring to the team that's incredibly valuable, or whether you're telling the story of an idea to the company you work for, because you want to get internal support for our product, or whether you're telling the story externally, as an entrepreneur to raise capital, the setup is the same. And learning how to tell the story and practicing telling the story and dry run it with friends, with family with anybody who will listen and see do they pick up the key points critical and understanding and how to refine, take their feedback and refine that is a key skill. And certainly encourage everybody to work on that. I've been doing it for 30 years, and I work on it actively every week.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There has been I feel like a lot of talk surrounding How do we create environments in which our teams excel in which our teams enjoy working? What can we do to benefit the lives and the careers of our employees of our team members? And of course, that's incredibly important. I think, an area I'd like to hear a little bit more discussion about is what can team members do for their leaders to make their their leaders jobs easier? What What would you say to that question, what can the engineers do to make their leaders job easier?
Robert Whirley:That's a great question. And I think one that an engineer at any level can always benefit from consider. First thing I would say is, think about what what would your leader want? In my role, I want to hear how things are going. I want to hear the good news, the wins. I want to celebrate the wins with you and your team. But I also want to hear the bad news, where are we struggling? What's not going as well? And what I also want to hear what's your plan? I love to hear someone that says well here are winning, here's where we're struggling. And this is our point, and we're going to come forward with this approach to see if we can solve a particular challenge and always heavy contingencies so that you know Know that if plan A doesn't work, we have Plan B, and Plan C. Having that kind of information brought to me as a leader, that really helps me to work effectively with that engineer and with that team. I don't like to be surprised. No computer likes it when they hear nothing but good news. And then the night before the day before a big presentation. Well, that's actually didn't work or
Aaron Moncur:you don't want fries.
Robert Whirley:Exactly. So I think that's a the the key thing I would say is avoid surprises.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, our engineering manager, her pipeline likes to say the bad news does not age. Well. The host thought that was very clever saying, and that it's a huge point, I think that how do I phrase this, I absolutely want my team to come to me when there's a problem and not trying to you know, pretend that problem doesn't exist. I encourage people, when you're delivering a problem to your project manager or whoever it is, don't just deliver the problem. Think about the solution is well, just like you said, Robert, but coming to your leader with just a problem. Yeah, that that kind of puts your leader in a tough spot. But if you can go there with a problem and an idea for a solution that says a lot more about the individual than otherwise?
Robert Whirley:Absolutely. And in fact, when that's kind of a step in the phases that I see the growth and maturity of someone on one of my direct reports, in the beginning, they'll come to me with a problem. And I will not give them any answer, I will lead them to go figure out some answers and come back to me with some. And then after a while, they'll come to a problem to meet with a problem and say, Robert, I got a problem. And here's a couple solutions. What do you think? And I think that's great. We talked about which one should do this? Yeah, go do that. And then what I find is, after a while, they'll come back to me and say, Robert, I've got a problem here three solutions. This is one I want to do. Here's why. And I say sounds good. Go do that. Final Phase is they come to me and say, Robert, we have a problem. But we have three solutions. And we implemented one of them, and it solved it. Good afternoon. So absolutely. It's a sequence and bringing some potential solutions, even if they're not the ones that are going what shows initiative to a leader that you really want to see.
Aaron Moncur:Robert, we're about at time here. And I want to be respectful to your time, because I know you're a busy man, I do have a few more questions, I would love to ask, but only if you have a few more minutes. That's fine, absolutely. Great. Great. If you had to create a checklist to ensure that an engineering team was was doing the most important factors to contribute to the success of a development program, what would be on that list?
Robert Whirley:A checklist for the most important factors for a successful development program. Probably the first thing I would say was, do you really understand the problem? Is it a technical problem? Is it a user interface problem? Is it a cost problem? What exactly is the problem that you want to solve? And I can't overemphasize that has to be precise, it can't be a fuzzy understanding of the problem. When you're ready to start the solution, if the problem understanding is fuzzy, you've got to go clarify that. So the first thing I would say is do a crystal clear understanding of the problem you want to solve? The second thing I would say is, do you have the right team, the right people around the table? That's the right skill sets the right temperaments, the right. Dynamic among the team. I've seen teams that you may have the right skill sets, but it's just not the right dynamic for a particular project. And so I look for do we have the right combination of someone called hard skills and soft skills? There? And then do we have the right resources? There is no point no matter how passionate for the Senate garage are about doing a manned mission to Mars, that's probably not going to happen. And so we've got to have the right resources. If we don't have the resource to take on the big problem. Is there a way we can scale that down? So I kind of look for do we understand the problem? Do we have the right team? And do we have the right resources? And if we have those three things, we will find a way.
Aaron Moncur:That is a trifecta right there. That sounds like a recipe to success for sure. All right. If if you had the chance, let's say not even the chance, let's say that for some reason, you were forced to start your career from the beginning again, what would you do differently?
Robert Whirley:Oh, that would be fun. Opportunity.
Aaron Moncur:I think that's a great start to the answer.
Robert Whirley:Yeah. I would say that I would focus early on, probably on developing communication skills. Early on, I focused a lot on solving the most complex equations and having the most technical depth. And I think that is absolutely important. So I don't downplay that. But I would probably put more emphasis on communication skills, and on business skills, understanding how to get financing for a project. When leadership looks at a project, how did they decide whether it's a project to fund and whether it's leadership in a company or talking to a venture capital firm, or, or other source of funding or even University Department of funding? What do they look at? And that comes back to a point you made Aaron, what does the customer want? Here? And if I were earlier in my career targeted that I probably could have been more effective for my career.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, look, last question. Almost the last question, one and a half questions. Last. Last ones give me what what are one or two of the biggest challenges that that you face? At work, you know, each day each week each month?
Robert Whirley:Yeah, biggest, biggest challenges, boy, but but part of my job is those change constantly. The right now one of our biggest challenges is COVID-19. And its effect on the medical infrastructure, hospitals are busy treating patients and not doing clinical trials of medical devices. So I think it's managing to the unknown. As engineers, we like to have things very defined in a box. And we only do heart problem, and we like to have our world. And that's, that's good. That's what we should strive for. But reality is that the environment changes whether it's in our situation, as I've just described, an unexpected disease pandemic, or whether its competitor comes up with a product that's disruptive to a market you were targeting. And you need to pivot into reposition your product relative to that competitor, or whether it's a funding discontinuity that in your company or your venture capital team, suddenly that you thought funding was in place, and it was, and you have to pivot in recast the story and the funding strategy for your project. I think those external challenges and how they interact with the team are a tremendous amount of fun, they're challenging, but they're a lot of fun to solve. And that's, that's what I just can't wait to get up and do every day.
Aaron Moncur:I love to hear that. Robert, your energy and enthusiasm is contagious. How can people get a hold of you? Whether it's questions about our Tarika? Or, you know, unrelated? What's the best way for a person to get ahold of you?
Robert Whirley:Sure. I'm on LinkedIn with anybody smoking. And I'm also at Robert at Robert quarterly.com. So feel free to drop me an email.
Aaron Moncur:That's W H. IRLEY. Correct.
Robert Whirley:That's right. Robert Baker. quarterly.com.
Aaron Moncur:All right. Well, Robert, thank you so much for for spending some time with us today. It has been very rewarding, listening to some stories about your background and hearing some of your insights and the best practices you've shared with us. So thank you so much for spending this time.
Robert Whirley:It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Aaron Moncur: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
