Most engineering teams skip to the last step. They automate a process that should not exist. Now it runs faster, and it still shouldn’t.
SpaceX does the reverse. Elon Musk codified its method into five steps the company calls the Algorithm, drilled into its engineers and documented in Walter Isaacson’s biography. The order is the entire point:
- Question every requirement. Each one needs a real person’s name attached, never “the legal department.” Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because nobody questions them.
- Delete the part or process. If you don’t add at least 10% back later, you didn’t cut enough.
- Simplify and optimize. But only what survived step two. Never polish what should not exist.
- Accelerate the cycle. Every process can go faster, just not before the first three steps.
- Automate. Last. Always last.
Run them out of order and you optimize waste, then automate it. Run them in order, enough times, and the result looks like nothing else in the industry.
Question the requirement. Delete what you can. Then, and only then, automate.
Source: the SpaceX “Algorithm,” from Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, shared by Marc Andreessen.