Devastate the Competition via Robust Design with Adam Bahret | The CTO Podcast

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Episode description

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Episode description

Etienne sits down with Adam Bahret, whose unique journey has fueled his passion for creating robust product designs that can outperform the competition. The conversation reveals how prioritizing reliability can significantly impact a product's success and why reliability often trumps marketing.

Tune is as Adam introduces his innovative R-Three blueprint which balances cost, features, and risk to ensure successful product launches without regrets. He also discusses the often overlooked issue of technical debt in software development, emphasizing the importance of early risk assessment.

With his insights being drawn from his book Devastate the Competition: How to Take Market Share through Robust Design, he aims to connect product development with achieving business objectives, and he and Etienne engage in insightful dialogue about the challenges and solutions in reliability engineering. They discuss Adam's experiences living in Denmark and the cultural differences that shaped his approach to learning and working in engineering. Their conversation also touches on the differences between reliability and quality, illustrating how these concepts play important roles in the design and manufacturing processes.

Adam also highlights the importance of using proper methods for early risk assessment, ensuring a more dependable final product. He shares his creative approach to making reliability concepts accessible to everyone through comic book guides, aimed at simplifying complex tools and techniques.

Listen in to gain valuable insights into how robust product design can lead to dominating the market, the significance of balancing multiple factors in product development, and practical tips for incorporating reliability engineering principles across various industries!

Time Stamps:[1:29] - Adam, born in New York, now lives in Boston after working in Denmark for two years.[3:54] - Adam shares how he pretended not to understand Danish so that a homeless person switched to English for spare change.[5:00] - Learn where the title of Devastate the Competition comes from.[6:17] - Adam explains the concept of reliability engineering.[8:48] - Quality ensures consistency in manufacturing, while reliability creates robust designs for durable, useful technology.[10:00] - Adam touches upon why he wrote Reliability Culture and why he wrote Devastate the Competition.[13:07] - Adam aims to prevent regrets in product development by establishing processes for wise, efficient decisions.[14:46] - Adam explains his R-Three blueprint.[16:50] - Adam emphasizes the importance of product ratio factors in decision-making.[18:24] - Adam suggests prioritizing robust design for proactive decision-making and smoother processes.[21:29] - It’s important to align individual goals with overall business objectives for success.[24:00] - Etienne discusses how individuals in different roles prioritize their incentives, possibly leading to deviations from the intended path.[25:10] - Adam advocates for measuring "time to reliability" for better decision-making.[28:54] - Adam explains the sawtooth pattern in software reliability curves.[31:00] - Reduce software bugs by identifying and eliminating infrequently used code through script scanning.[32:02] - Hear how Adam simplifies reliability concepts via comic books, aiming to make fundamental tools more accessible.[35:20] - Adam explains why he finds the term HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) misleading.[37:26] - Adam compares reliability tools to car controls, advocating for their accessibility and understanding.[39:13] - Etienne discusses technical debt, emphasizing the trade-offs made in software development for faster time to market.[41:21] - Where can listeners reach Adam?