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300: Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton
https://youtu.be/avv30Z0wD9Q
Josh Tarbutton, Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication, is on a mission to restore the dignity of engineers and unleash their creative potential through intentional culture and agile structure.
We explore Josh’s journey from soldier and professor to engineering leader, and his Engagement Success Framework, which includes: Scoping/Visioning, Customer Communication, Resourcing, and Solution. Josh explains how this structured process allows Bravo Team to align deeply with client goals, unlock team creativity, and deliver complex, high-impact innovations with confidence. We also discuss how “grooming” a project helps avoid costly misalignments, how AI and Agile methods are transforming the engineering workflow, and why design for sustainability and accessibility will define the next frontier of innovation.
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Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Josh Tarbutton, former professor, soldier, and currently the Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication. Josh, welcome to the show.
Steve, glad to be here, thank you.
Well, I’m excited to have this conversation because your kind of firm has not been represented on the show for the last 300 episodes. So, we’re definitely gonna have some new insights and the new perspectives. We’ve never had an engineering consulting firm, I believe. And you also have a very inspiring “Why” of why you’re doing this. So let’s start with this. And would you share your personal “Why” and how you are manifesting it in Bravo Team?
Yes. So why Bravo Team or why do this? So I think there’s the truth that
if you want to create new things, you got to imagine them and put yourself in a position to create.
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Okay, so that is fascinating. And you mentioned the dignity of engineering. So, what is happening with the dignity of engineering? Why it needs to be restored?
So fundamentally, dignity is, I think, mostly just about respect. And I think, sometimes, when two people are having a conversation, our assumptions that we bring into the conversation can really take away from what the other person is saying. And I think that happens a lot in engineering, where the engineer is doing their best to try to communicate what needs to be communicated. And yet, there’s a little bit that’s lost in translation. So, then the engineer comes across as being a resistive or adding some restriction or creating problems or trying to slow things down. When in reality, I’d say almost all the time, these individuals are trying to help and reduce risk and increase the customer experience. And so there’s a little bit of this conflict between, I think, just in translation, between doing the design and development work the right way and then landing it in the marketplace. And we don’t really prepare engineers very well for the economics of manufacturing, design, production. And we don’t really always prepare leaders very well for what engineers are capable of and what they can do. And we certainly don’t create cultures, in my opinion, that foster engineers’ best work. And so I think we have a little bit of a problem culturally where the engineer is really kind of set to the side in a lot of industries. And I’ve seen this across the board. And I think we have an opportunity in the marketplace to just really unlock their power. And it’s really what it’s all about. So,
restoring the dignity of the engineers, really more about like unleashing their power for the organization, their creative power.
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I love that, unleashing the power of the engineer. So what does it take to unleash that power? How do you create a culture where engineers thrive and they can be creative and they can communicate better and play a bigger role in company?
I think it comes down to the culture, really, the culture that we build around development and innovation. I think the reason that it’s hard is because when a company decides to invest in new product offerings or the future or creating something, there’s often substantial risk. And so that pressure is often the financial pressure, the market pressure, hitting the timelines often, that business risk, it lands squarely on the development team. And yet, the development team is trying to create something from nothing. And so, there’s tremendous opportunity for people basically to attack each other. They feel afraid, they feel vulnerable. If the timeline or the budget is jeopardized. And so, this whole activity, if it’s not fostered in the right culture can blow up in people’s faces. And often, it is a source of friction. And I think we haven’t done a great job of resolving that. But I think,
primarily, the way you resolve it is is basically if you can understand what the creative and innovative process is fundamentally, and then basically nurture that process while people do development, then I think it'll go a long way to making…
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So, it sounds like it’s a combination of culture and structure, how you unleash the power of the engineers. Do I get this right?
Yeah, you can’t have one without the other.
So that’s a great segway because I’d like you to talk about this structure that you have developed, that Bravo Team, that helps you maximize the performance of your engineers and make them feel that they are self-actualizing as well. So would you walk us through this, I think it’s four stages, four stage process, maybe you call it the Engagement Success Framework or something like that. What does that look like for you guys?
Yes, we try to follow the design process and it’s a pretty typical service business arrangement. And I think, I’ll just pause there. Being a service business is a little bit unique because you’re constantly trying to optimize. You need really skilled individuals that you wanna meet their needs and retain. And then you have organizations that have business needs that those skilled individuals can meet. Those resources get sucked up really quickly. And as I say, every great engineer has a full time job. I mean, every great engineer is fully engaged, they’re not waiting around for work, they’re already busy. And so, how do you scale a business? How do you grow business? How do you execute on work in a service business? It’s highly dependent on the individual knowledge of that person. And so, what we have to do is be very careful when we bring the work into the business. So that’s pretty much the first step is getting that alignment, doing the scoping with the customer.
Often, we get the lead is generated. Most of the time, the customer needs a technical innovation, and so we have to map that into the knowledge that the team has. We have over 50 people here, over 30 engineers. We have various education levels, various experience. We have 22 mechanical engineers and then 8 computer and electrical engineers. And so we’ve got to map that work properly onto them, the timing and all that is really important. So this first step of the process, we try to spend a lot of time on and groom the work, map it to the right team. And then we start to go through the design process at a very high level to try to capture the concepts what the customer can expect. And then we move towards that alignment, finally getting a scope and a budget. And if we’re all on board, the customer’s on board, we kick off the project, we assign the resources and try to meet the timeline and budget, and then do the post delivery and make sure the customer’s gotten everything that they need and go from there.
Yeah, that’s fascinating. When you say groom the project, I haven’t heard this word being used a long time. In my investment banking business, we used grooming. That was the idea of how you prepare a company for sale. You kind of groom it, you fine tune all the various elements, but kind of the word maybe has gotten a negative connotation and not been used. I love it that you are using this in this context. So can you explain?
Yeah, absolutely. It actually comes out of Agile and I’m a certified Scrum Master. So I went and took the training from Jeff Sutherland and it comes this idea of grooming the backlog is taking a look at all of the incoming tasks in a very agile approach. And based upon what you’re learning dynamically on a day-to-day basis, you want to rhythmically go back at intervals and look at the incoming tasks and groom that work so that it is mostly seamlessly integrated into the schedule. And so, there’s this complex activity of looking forward and then renegotiating tasks and that whole process in an Agile, which is more from the software recently, that’s called backlog grooming, where you’re grooming the backlog of work. When we say grooming the work, it’s more of like this back and forth with the customer. They say, okay, we want this. We say, yeah, it’ll cost this. This is a way of doing it. Or maybe there’s three or four different ways to do that.
One example is, the customer wanted to mark these objects. And so we have a lot of different options. You wanna use a conveyor, you wanna use a bowl feeder, you wanna use a pick and place, do you wanna manually load? And often, when the customer is bringing us a problem, they don’t know the financial implications and we don’t know how they are gonna interact with the technology. And so
this process of grooming the work is sort of like really getting alignment, having those conversations.
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Yeah, I like it. So, it’s basically how you brainstorm with the customer to understand their context, how they would want to use that result or that outcome that you’re generating. And then, you have the financial inputs to find an optimal budget and outcome ratio, whatever it is. And then perhaps your resources also an input here. I mean, you can only do what you have resources for. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So, what is the tension between the customer expectations and the engineers’ creativity and innovation? Is there a tension there that you have to also manage?
Oh yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think a lot of the conflict just comes from just not really being able to have the conversations that we need to have at the right time. And it’s kind of like somebody saying that they want you to make a beef wellington for dinner. Well, that particular dish has many steps and it’s a complicated dish to get right and it’s not simple. And so, if the customer is asking for something, sometimes if we’re not given enough time to explain the process, then there can be a mismatch between what they think they’ve asked for and what we think we need to do to deliver what they’ve asked for. So sometimes, we get it wrong and we’re thinking of things more complicated than the customer, and sometimes, the customer is asking for things that are more complicated than they realize. And really,
it's just a matter of working together and building that relationship. It's just getting that healthy alignment. And I think making sure that there's that time to get that alignment is really important.
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Okay. So basically, as I understand this framework, so you have the customer, you communicate to the customer, you develop the use case that they are trying to achieve, or maybe they bring it to you, and then you are grooming this project so that it’s something that you can get done on time, on the budget the customer has and the way they would be using this thing. And then, you have to resource this project and essentially manage the project to completion. Now the resourcing, how do you resource this project? Is it just that every project has a mechanical, an electrical, a computer engineer, project manager or are there other aspects that you have to take into account when you’re resourcing a project like that?
Yeah, I would say the resourcing is a hard thing to do well because it’s just highly dependent on experience. And so, we rely on our most experienced engineers to scope the work. And if there’s something that we don’t know, we tell the customer that we’re going to have to add, we’re going to have to do a little bit of investigation to answer this particular part of it. But most of the stuff we can do in-house, we can scope in-house. And it’s part of the reason that we’ve built the company to the size we have, is so that we can have redundancy of skills and we can have overlap. We staff according to that Agile philosophy of having people that have depth and breadth and so we try to staff the teams so that they’re interlocking in depth and breadth and we also have organized them on different teams. So we have five teams, four engineering teams, and then a machining and fabrication team. And these teams are meeting together.
When we get a proposal in, we kind of know who we need. So it might end up going to a particular team. So we’ll have the engineers from that team work with the sales team on the final step of grooming. The sales team, which includes myself and some other engineers, we try to get the work as close as we can. And then we’ll bring in that team and who will be working on it. And then we’ll work together. We’ll introduce them to the customer. We’ll get that final alignment. And then we’ll schedule the kickoff, and then we just run for it. But definitely, it requires experience. Fortunately, I was in academia for nine years and met a lot of people and have a lot of contacts. And so, our network is very strong as well. So, if it is a customer that needs something very, very specific or nuanced, I mean, I can call the professor who wrote the book on the topic and just ask him or bring him in most of the time.
Yeah. I guess this is a huge advantage for you. Having been in academia for about nine years, you have a network and you can pull in the resources. So I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about AI because it’s really impacting everyone and every industry. And I’m just wondering, what is your vision or maybe it’s already happening to some extent? How are you guys going to use or are you using AI and how is it going to change your approach and your process?
Yes, when I was a professor, I tried to encourage everyone and try to listen to myself to be somewhat technology agnostic. Don’t proclaim your particular faith in any particular technology because technology is always changing, the landscape is changing and the rate of change in our lifetime and this time now is so incredible. You don’t have the luxury of not keeping both eyes open and every day kind of keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. And AI is transforming everything. I mean, we all know this. We’re seeing it creep up in places we never expected. It’s going to change engineering, the way we do engineering forever. The tools aren’t quite here yet, but I’m seeing their echoes. We certainly are using AI to be more productive in many different ways. I mean, the simplest way is just in document generation and communication. It’s just incredible how much more productive you can be. We do image processing and vision and computer vision and a lot of vision-related automation for our customers.
And we were creating sort of an internal manual. How do you make all these decisions? How do you pick the camera, the field of view? How do you know what a half-inch versus three-quarter-inch, or one-inch sensor is? What are these weird, nuanced terminologies that have to do with the fact that a camera was historically measured for the one inch tube that the light passed through and now we have these weird. So just things like that that could have taken me hours to generate sort of a guide, but using I think Claude.ai, it took me, I mean, record time to generate high quality content. Of course, I was the one who was the person to validate the quality of the content, but things like that are, those little things are going to be everywhere. But I think with regard to the delivery of engineering, I think the AI tools are going to be showing up everywhere.
Automated, exploded drawings for CAD packages with ways of doing the assembly that are attached to specific hardware. I think there’s many low-hanging opportunities for AI to make us more productive in engineering. If you think about the electrical engineering design workflow, where you’ve got to pick a bunch of components of components and then you got to route a bunch of wires, I think there’s tools that are going to show up there to make engineers more productive. But it would be fascinating to see how far AI can take us in design. And right now,
design is really kind of one of those things that we've seen AI do very well in two dimensions in terms of art and now movies and graphics.
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So, the more availability of these tools to increase productivity, and it’s not just you that’s going to increase productivity, other people in the market. Is it going to make the availability of engineering solutions broader, more democratized for more businesses and maybe individuals? So, do you have like a vision of what it could look like, how the pie could grow and what kind of things could be possible?
Yeah, I think, I mean, when it comes to designs, like for example, like a table, should you really have to go find an individual to design a table? I mean, we have enough examples of certain things that AI should be able to get right the first time, but then it gets into like style and color, material, finish, but if you look at the 2D tools, you just say like, oh, can you change this image and make it more art deco and boom, it does it. So I think where you have designs that are sort of classical templars for a solution, you think cups, forks, tables, chairs, beds, etc. Many, many, many classical things. I think those tools should enable anybody to just do it. But then how do you make it? And then you have your joints and your fasteners and you have the assembly and then how you do packaging and then there’s so much that goes into the delivery of a physical artifact to the end customer that’s ripe for innovation. I think
we can innovate in all ways that can go there. But there's products that are designed the way they are just so that they are cheaper to package.
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Yes, yes it is. I’m just wondering, we’ve got 3D printing, robotization, and AI, and it’s all coming together and maybe we can, at some point, we could produce stuff for ourselves, whatever we need, we can just have AI design it and 3D printing create it or maybe have a robot help with it. I don’t know. This is really crazy. The future is very broad.
And the details, the devil’s in the details, making something we can do, making it where it doesn’t wear out for many years, doesn’t corrode, doesn’t fatigue, doesn’t rust prematurely, designing for recovery. I think one of the things that in Europe that they do is they require many manufacturers to take their products back at the end of their life. For example, in Germany, BMW has to deliver their car. They have to take their cars back. They are socially responsible for the product that they put into the marketplace. Well, that’s a whole another design problem. Like how do you design a headlight so that you can disassemble it, get all of the chemicals out and recycle it to 100%. And we have engineers that are working on design for sustainability. And I think when you talk about AI, it’s like, well, you got to design for manufacturing, you got to design for assembly, you got to design for cost, you got to design for packaging, you got to design for sustainability, you got to design all these things, which is a great argument for using AI. Also, I’m 45, so it’s the argument that I use, well, maybe I can make it to the end of my life and still not be replaced by the bot. So I don’t know, it’ll be fascinating. But I’m the kind of guy, I want people to have more tools.
I want people to have more access. We don't want to control people. It's sort of like giving them more paint and more brushes to create with. And I think to the extent that we can help each other create faster and cleaner and help each other make…
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I mean, maybe I’m naive or people call me naive, but I’m very optimistic. I think that when we improve productivity, it means that everybody can create more value. As a society, we are creating more value, which means people will have access to more, more wealth or more services or whatever, which will increase demand for things that we don’t even know what they are. So, I don’t think that we are going to run out of needs that people can supply in whatever way they’re going to be supplying it. So I don’t think that this mass unemployment is going to be a thing for us. And perhaps one of the needs will be to make it sustainable, to make it recyclable, to make it not spoil our environment. And that’s going to be a huge engineering challenge, as you say, and if you need people to coordinate those AI agents to help orchestrate this whole thing.
Yeah, there was time where we didn’t have metal and we didn’t have nails and we didn’t have shovels or hammers. And we are a hundred times more productive in machining than we were just like 50, 60 years ago. I think what we forget about is it’s a tool. So, it’s a tool that you’re giving to other humans. So what are people going to do? They’re going to do the same thing that they’ve done since the beginning of time. Some people are going to help other people, and some people are going to hurt other people. And my hope is that these tools help us also increase our awareness, so that as we’re using them, we are also improving the overall quality of the human experience globally. I think that’s really where
the real opportunity is in more of a global stewardship of people.
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I mean, education, it’s completely democratizes education, information, access to information. You can ask any questions and you get an immediate answer. I mean, how cool is that for curious people anyway?
It could be life-changing, transformative.
Yeah. And I think it comes back actually full circle from the first question I asked you, which is, what is your personal “Why” that you’re manifesting in the business? I see that the most successful companies, they all have a strong “Why” of why they are doing this, how they are ultimately helping people because all those “Why’s” have to come back to this. We are helping people in one ways or another. And if you put all that energy behind the right projects, we can really make things much, much better for everyone.
Yeah, I like to say that the engineer, he or she takes the laws of the universe and they paint them on the canvas of our world to make life better for people. And I think it’s a worthy endeavor. And so from my “Why” is anything that I can do to empower that creative individual that has decided to suffer through years of engineering school, so that they can make things for other people that improve their quality of life. I think that’s really all I want to do is, I want that to be as easy as possible. And I think it could be easier if people were more vulnerable, if they were more honest about what things actually cost and we could just work together in a more open way, then I actually believe we could deliver innovation much faster.
Yeah. Okay. That’s super awesome. Well, definitely check out Bravo Team and Joshua Tarbutton. What do you recommend people do in order to get in touch with you or to learn more about what you guys are doing at Bravo Team?
I’d say if you have a need for innovation and you want someone to help you create it, create the future, then reach out to us. www.bravoteam.tech is our website. I have a website www.jtarbutton.com. I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn because I have a funny name. And we love helping people create new things and really grateful to be here, Steve, and thankful for what you do to help us run better businesses.
Well, thanks for the plug, Josh. And if you’re interested in how to create the future and how to engineer the future, definitely check out www.bravoteam.tech and check out Josh’s LinkedIn page as well. So, thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, give us a review on Apple Podcasts and stay tuned because every week I come with an exciting personality who will share you about business frameworks and how to take their business and your business to the next level. So, thanks, Josh, for coming and thank you for listening.
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https://youtu.be/avv30Z0wD9Q
Josh Tarbutton, Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication, is on a mission to restore the dignity of engineers and unleash their creative potential through intentional culture and agile structure.
We explore Josh’s journey from soldier and professor to engineering leader, and his Engagement Success Framework, which includes: Scoping/Visioning, Customer Communication, Resourcing, and Solution. Josh explains how this structured process allows Bravo Team to align deeply with client goals, unlock team creativity, and deliver complex, high-impact innovations with confidence. We also discuss how “grooming” a project helps avoid costly misalignments, how AI and Agile methods are transforming the engineering workflow, and why design for sustainability and accessibility will define the next frontier of innovation.
—
Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Josh Tarbutton, former professor, soldier, and currently the Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication. Josh, welcome to the show.
Steve, glad to be here, thank you.
Well, I’m excited to have this conversation because your kind of firm has not been represented on the show for the last 300 episodes. So, we’re definitely gonna have some new insights and the new perspectives. We’ve never had an engineering consulting firm, I believe. And you also have a very inspiring “Why” of why you’re doing this. So let’s start with this. And would you share your personal “Why” and how you are manifesting it in Bravo Team?
Yes. So why Bravo Team or why do this? So I think there’s the truth that
if you want to create new things, you got to imagine them and put yourself in a position to create.
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Okay, so that is fascinating. And you mentioned the dignity of engineering. So, what is happening with the dignity of engineering? Why it needs to be restored?
So fundamentally, dignity is, I think, mostly just about respect. And I think, sometimes, when two people are having a conversation, our assumptions that we bring into the conversation can really take away from what the other person is saying. And I think that happens a lot in engineering, where the engineer is doing their best to try to communicate what needs to be communicated. And yet, there’s a little bit that’s lost in translation. So, then the engineer comes across as being a resistive or adding some restriction or creating problems or trying to slow things down. When in reality, I’d say almost all the time, these individuals are trying to help and reduce risk and increase the customer experience. And so there’s a little bit of this conflict between, I think, just in translation, between doing the design and development work the right way and then landing it in the marketplace. And we don’t really prepare engineers very well for the economics of manufacturing, design, production. And we don’t really always prepare leaders very well for what engineers are capable of and what they can do. And we certainly don’t create cultures, in my opinion, that foster engineers’ best work. And so I think we have a little bit of a problem culturally where the engineer is really kind of set to the side in a lot of industries. And I’ve seen this across the board. And I think we have an opportunity in the marketplace to just really unlock their power. And it’s really what it’s all about. So,
restoring the dignity of the engineers, really more about like unleashing their power for the organization, their creative power.
Share on X
I love that, unleashing the power of the engineer. So what does it take to unleash that power? How do you create a culture where engineers thrive and they can be creative and they can communicate better and play a bigger role in company?
I think it comes down to the culture, really, the culture that we build around development and innovation. I think the reason that it’s hard is because when a company decides to invest in new product offerings or the future or creating something, there’s often substantial risk. And so that pressure is often the financial pressure, the market pressure, hitting the timelines often, that business risk, it lands squarely on the development team. And yet, the development team is trying to create something from nothing. And so, there’s tremendous opportunity for people basically to attack each other. They feel afraid, they feel vulnerable. If the timeline or the budget is jeopardized. And so, this whole activity, if it’s not fostered in the right culture can blow up in people’s faces. And often, it is a source of friction. And I think we haven’t done a great job of resolving that. But I think,
primarily, the way you resolve it is is basically if you can understand what the creative and innovative process is fundamentally, and then basically nurture that process while people do development, then I think it'll go a long way to making…
Share on X
So, it sounds like it’s a combination of culture and structure, how you unleash the power of the engineers. Do I get this right?
Yeah, you can’t have one without the other.
So that’s a great segway because I’d like you to talk about this structure that you have developed, that Bravo Team, that helps you maximize the performance of your engineers and make them feel that they are self-actualizing as well. So would you walk us through this, I think it’s four stages, four stage process, maybe you call it the Engagement Success Framework or something like that. What does that look like for you guys?
Yes, we try to follow the design process and it’s a pretty typical service business arrangement. And I think, I’ll just pause there. Being a service business is a little bit unique because you’re constantly trying to optimize. You need really skilled individuals that you wanna meet their needs and retain. And then you have organizations that have business needs that those skilled individuals can meet. Those resources get sucked up really quickly. And as I say, every great engineer has a full time job. I mean, every great engineer is fully engaged, they’re not waiting around for work, they’re already busy. And so, how do you scale a business? How do you grow business? How do you execute on work in a service business? It’s highly dependent on the individual knowledge of that person. And so, what we have to do is be very careful when we bring the work into the business. So that’s pretty much the first step is getting that alignment, doing the scoping with the customer.
Often, we get the lead is generated. Most of the time, the customer needs a technical innovation, and so we have to map that into the knowledge that the team has. We have over 50 people here, over 30 engineers. We have various education levels, various experience. We have 22 mechanical engineers and then 8 computer and electrical engineers. And so we’ve got to map that work properly onto them, the timing and all that is really important. So this first step of the process, we try to spend a lot of time on and groom the work, map it to the right team. And then we start to go through the design process at a very high level to try to capture the concepts what the customer can expect. And then we move towards that alignment, finally getting a scope and a budget. And if we’re all on board, the customer’s on board, we kick off the project, we assign the resources and try to meet the timeline and budget, and then do the post delivery and make sure the customer’s gotten everything that they need and go from there.
Yeah, that’s fascinating. When you say groom the project, I haven’t heard this word being used a long time. In my investment banking business, we used grooming. That was the idea of how you prepare a company for sale. You kind of groom it, you fine tune all the various elements, but kind of the word maybe has gotten a negative connotation and not been used. I love it that you are using this in this context. So can you explain?
Yeah, absolutely. It actually comes out of Agile and I’m a certified Scrum Master. So I went and took the training from Jeff Sutherland and it comes this idea of grooming the backlog is taking a look at all of the incoming tasks in a very agile approach. And based upon what you’re learning dynamically on a day-to-day basis, you want to rhythmically go back at intervals and look at the incoming tasks and groom that work so that it is mostly seamlessly integrated into the schedule. And so, there’s this complex activity of looking forward and then renegotiating tasks and that whole process in an Agile, which is more from the software recently, that’s called backlog grooming, where you’re grooming the backlog of work. When we say grooming the work, it’s more of like this back and forth with the customer. They say, okay, we want this. We say, yeah, it’ll cost this. This is a way of doing it. Or maybe there’s three or four different ways to do that.
One example is, the customer wanted to mark these objects. And so we have a lot of different options. You wanna use a conveyor, you wanna use a bowl feeder, you wanna use a pick and place, do you wanna manually load? And often, when the customer is bringing us a problem, they don’t know the financial implications and we don’t know how they are gonna interact with the technology. And so
this process of grooming the work is sort of like really getting alignment, having those conversations.
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Yeah, I like it. So, it’s basically how you brainstorm with the customer to understand their context, how they would want to use that result or that outcome that you’re generating. And then, you have the financial inputs to find an optimal budget and outcome ratio, whatever it is. And then perhaps your resources also an input here. I mean, you can only do what you have resources for. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So, what is the tension between the customer expectations and the engineers’ creativity and innovation? Is there a tension there that you have to also manage?
Oh yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think a lot of the conflict just comes from just not really being able to have the conversations that we need to have at the right time. And it’s kind of like somebody saying that they want you to make a beef wellington for dinner. Well, that particular dish has many steps and it’s a complicated dish to get right and it’s not simple. And so, if the customer is asking for something, sometimes if we’re not given enough time to explain the process, then there can be a mismatch between what they think they’ve asked for and what we think we need to do to deliver what they’ve asked for. So sometimes, we get it wrong and we’re thinking of things more complicated than the customer, and sometimes, the customer is asking for things that are more complicated than they realize. And really,
it's just a matter of working together and building that relationship. It's just getting that healthy alignment. And I think making sure that there's that time to get that alignment is really important.
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Okay. So basically, as I understand this framework, so you have the customer, you communicate to the customer, you develop the use case that they are trying to achieve, or maybe they bring it to you, and then you are grooming this project so that it’s something that you can get done on time, on the budget the customer has and the way they would be using this thing. And then, you have to resource this project and essentially manage the project to completion. Now the resourcing, how do you resource this project? Is it just that every project has a mechanical, an electrical, a computer engineer, project manager or are there other aspects that you have to take into account when you’re resourcing a project like that?
Yeah, I would say the resourcing is a hard thing to do well because it’s just highly dependent on experience. And so, we rely on our most experienced engineers to scope the work. And if there’s something that we don’t know, we tell the customer that we’re going to have to add, we’re going to have to do a little bit of investigation to answer this particular part of it. But most of the stuff we can do in-house, we can scope in-house. And it’s part of the reason that we’ve built the company to the size we have, is so that we can have redundancy of skills and we can have overlap. We staff according to that Agile philosophy of having people that have depth and breadth and so we try to staff the teams so that they’re interlocking in depth and breadth and we also have organized them on different teams. So we have five teams, four engineering teams, and then a machining and fabrication team. And these teams are meeting together.
When we get a proposal in, we kind of know who we need. So it might end up going to a particular team. So we’ll have the engineers from that team work with the sales team on the final step of grooming. The sales team, which includes myself and some other engineers, we try to get the work as close as we can. And then we’ll bring in that team and who will be working on it. And then we’ll work together. We’ll introduce them to the customer. We’ll get that final alignment. And then we’ll schedule the kickoff, and then we just run for it. But definitely, it requires experience. Fortunately, I was in academia for nine years and met a lot of people and have a lot of contacts. And so, our network is very strong as well. So, if it is a customer that needs something very, very specific or nuanced, I mean, I can call the professor who wrote the book on the topic and just ask him or bring him in most of the time.
Yeah. I guess this is a huge advantage for you. Having been in academia for about nine years, you have a network and you can pull in the resources. So I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about AI because it’s really impacting everyone and every industry. And I’m just wondering, what is your vision or maybe it’s already happening to some extent? How are you guys going to use or are you using AI and how is it going to change your approach and your process?
Yes, when I was a professor, I tried to encourage everyone and try to listen to myself to be somewhat technology agnostic. Don’t proclaim your particular faith in any particular technology because technology is always changing, the landscape is changing and the rate of change in our lifetime and this time now is so incredible. You don’t have the luxury of not keeping both eyes open and every day kind of keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. And AI is transforming everything. I mean, we all know this. We’re seeing it creep up in places we never expected. It’s going to change engineering, the way we do engineering forever. The tools aren’t quite here yet, but I’m seeing their echoes. We certainly are using AI to be more productive in many different ways. I mean, the simplest way is just in document generation and communication. It’s just incredible how much more productive you can be. We do image processing and vision and computer vision and a lot of vision-related automation for our customers.
And we were creating sort of an internal manual. How do you make all these decisions? How do you pick the camera, the field of view? How do you know what a half-inch versus three-quarter-inch, or one-inch sensor is? What are these weird, nuanced terminologies that have to do with the fact that a camera was historically measured for the one inch tube that the light passed through and now we have these weird. So just things like that that could have taken me hours to generate sort of a guide, but using I think Claude.ai, it took me, I mean, record time to generate high quality content. Of course, I was the one who was the person to validate the quality of the content, but things like that are, those little things are going to be everywhere. But I think with regard to the delivery of engineering, I think the AI tools are going to be showing up everywhere.
Automated, exploded drawings for CAD packages with ways of doing the assembly that are attached to specific hardware. I think there’s many low-hanging opportunities for AI to make us more productive in engineering. If you think about the electrical engineering design workflow, where you’ve got to pick a bunch of components of components and then you got to route a bunch of wires, I think there’s tools that are going to show up there to make engineers more productive. But it would be fascinating to see how far AI can take us in design. And right now,
design is really kind of one of those things that we've seen AI do very well in two dimensions in terms of art and now movies and graphics.
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So, the more availability of these tools to increase productivity, and it’s not just you that’s going to increase productivity, other people in the market. Is it going to make the availability of engineering solutions broader, more democratized for more businesses and maybe individuals? So, do you have like a vision of what it could look like, how the pie could grow and what kind of things could be possible?
Yeah, I think, I mean, when it comes to designs, like for example, like a table, should you really have to go find an individual to design a table? I mean, we have enough examples of certain things that AI should be able to get right the first time, but then it gets into like style and color, material, finish, but if you look at the 2D tools, you just say like, oh, can you change this image and make it more art deco and boom, it does it. So I think where you have designs that are sort of classical templars for a solution, you think cups, forks, tables, chairs, beds, etc. Many, many, many classical things. I think those tools should enable anybody to just do it. But then how do you make it? And then you have your joints and your fasteners and you have the assembly and then how you do packaging and then there’s so much that goes into the delivery of a physical artifact to the end customer that’s ripe for innovation. I think
we can innovate in all ways that can go there. But there's products that are designed the way they are just so that they are cheaper to package.
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Yes, yes it is. I’m just wondering, we’ve got 3D printing, robotization, and AI, and it’s all coming together and maybe we can, at some point, we could produce stuff for ourselves, whatever we need, we can just have AI design it and 3D printing create it or maybe have a robot help with it. I don’t know. This is really crazy. The future is very broad.
And the details, the devil’s in the details, making something we can do, making it where it doesn’t wear out for many years, doesn’t corrode, doesn’t fatigue, doesn’t rust prematurely, designing for recovery. I think one of the things that in Europe that they do is they require many manufacturers to take their products back at the end of their life. For example, in Germany, BMW has to deliver their car. They have to take their cars back. They are socially responsible for the product that they put into the marketplace. Well, that’s a whole another design problem. Like how do you design a headlight so that you can disassemble it, get all of the chemicals out and recycle it to 100%. And we have engineers that are working on design for sustainability. And I think when you talk about AI, it’s like, well, you got to design for manufacturing, you got to design for assembly, you got to design for cost, you got to design for packaging, you got to design for sustainability, you got to design all these things, which is a great argument for using AI. Also, I’m 45, so it’s the argument that I use, well, maybe I can make it to the end of my life and still not be replaced by the bot. So I don’t know, it’ll be fascinating. But I’m the kind of guy, I want people to have more tools.
I want people to have more access. We don't want to control people. It's sort of like giving them more paint and more brushes to create with. And I think to the extent that we can help each other create faster and cleaner and help each other make…
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I mean, maybe I’m naive or people call me naive, but I’m very optimistic. I think that when we improve productivity, it means that everybody can create more value. As a society, we are creating more value, which means people will have access to more, more wealth or more services or whatever, which will increase demand for things that we don’t even know what they are. So, I don’t think that we are going to run out of needs that people can supply in whatever way they’re going to be supplying it. So I don’t think that this mass unemployment is going to be a thing for us. And perhaps one of the needs will be to make it sustainable, to make it recyclable, to make it not spoil our environment. And that’s going to be a huge engineering challenge, as you say, and if you need people to coordinate those AI agents to help orchestrate this whole thing.
Yeah, there was time where we didn’t have metal and we didn’t have nails and we didn’t have shovels or hammers. And we are a hundred times more productive in machining than we were just like 50, 60 years ago. I think what we forget about is it’s a tool. So, it’s a tool that you’re giving to other humans. So what are people going to do? They’re going to do the same thing that they’ve done since the beginning of time. Some people are going to help other people, and some people are going to hurt other people. And my hope is that these tools help us also increase our awareness, so that as we’re using them, we are also improving the overall quality of the human experience globally. I think that’s really where
the real opportunity is in more of a global stewardship of people.
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I mean, education, it’s completely democratizes education, information, access to information. You can ask any questions and you get an immediate answer. I mean, how cool is that for curious people anyway?
It could be life-changing, transformative.
Yeah. And I think it comes back actually full circle from the first question I asked you, which is, what is your personal “Why” that you’re manifesting in the business? I see that the most successful companies, they all have a strong “Why” of why they are doing this, how they are ultimately helping people because all those “Why’s” have to come back to this. We are helping people in one ways or another. And if you put all that energy behind the right projects, we can really make things much, much better for everyone.
Yeah, I like to say that the engineer, he or she takes the laws of the universe and they paint them on the canvas of our world to make life better for people. And I think it’s a worthy endeavor. And so from my “Why” is anything that I can do to empower that creative individual that has decided to suffer through years of engineering school, so that they can make things for other people that improve their quality of life. I think that’s really all I want to do is, I want that to be as easy as possible. And I think it could be easier if people were more vulnerable, if they were more honest about what things actually cost and we could just work together in a more open way, then I actually believe we could deliver innovation much faster.
Yeah. Okay. That’s super awesome. Well, definitely check out Bravo Team and Joshua Tarbutton. What do you recommend people do in order to get in touch with you or to learn more about what you guys are doing at Bravo Team?
I’d say if you have a need for innovation and you want someone to help you create it, create the future, then reach out to us. www.bravoteam.tech is our website. I have a website www.jtarbutton.com. I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn because I have a funny name. And we love helping people create new things and really grateful to be here, Steve, and thankful for what you do to help us run better businesses.
Well, thanks for the plug, Josh. And if you’re interested in how to create the future and how to engineer the future, definitely check out www.bravoteam.tech and check out Josh’s LinkedIn page as well. So, thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, give us a review on Apple Podcasts and stay tuned because every week I come with an exciting personality who will share you about business frameworks and how to take their business and your business to the next level. So, thanks, Josh, for coming and thank you for listening.
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