Take Proper Notes
Companies are, without a doubt, an overly complicated way of making money. Machinery, computers, people, processes, buildings, and a long et cetera. Why do they even exist? A marketing manager would say: to create great products people will love. Whatever. A bureaucrat who read a book or two would argue: for efficiency, to reduce cost of transactions. Yawn.
Sure, there are romantic or scientific takes on it. Fundamentally, companies exist because there is no better way to reach market fitness than getting together to collectively learn how to do something. The experience curve nicely represents this relationship: The longer an activity is performed, the more experience about it accumulates, and the more performance improves, which compounds in time to be a competitive advantage when others are trying a similar thing. Known as “Wright’s Law”1, it states that “we learn by doing” and that the cost of the things we produce decreases as a function of the cumulative number of things produced. It reads quite obviously, but tends to go underestimated.
Years ago, when I was a young engineer full of dreams (and hair), I was working in a company which made, and still makes, LED digital billboards. We were struggling with expensive and long lead-time PCB prototypes, so we wanted to try an in-house rapid PCB prototyping system. For this, we chose the known approach of using cheap copper sheets added with photosensitive dry film and exposing them to UV light to create the pattern of the PCB tracks to be etched by a ferric chloride solution. Actually, you want the PCB tracks to stay and all the rest to go away, so you expose the photosensitive film to the negative of the PCB design, usually printed on a transparency. So we went ahead and made this poor man’s PCB prototyping station, with a cutting area to tailor the big copper sheets to size, a UV exposing device (which looked like a crappy copying machine where you would put the copper plate to face the lights and close a lid), a bucket to soak the exposed PCB with the etchant, a cleaning and drying station and finally a drilling station. There were a lot of quirks around the process: cutting precision, time of exposure, time of etching, aligning top and bottom layers, the quality of the print of the negative PCB pattern in the transparent film, drilling precision, and a long, painful et cetera. When we started, it was awful; everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. We couldn’t get anything decent, and we were using tons of materials; we were clearly winging it. At some point, the company owner came to check (we’d been enthusiastically pitching the idea to him for weeks); although he was not impressed, he said: “I hope you are taking proper notes”. It felt so stupidly obvious, yet such sound advice. We were not really collectively compiling our experiences but only keeping isolated notes here and there. So we decided to put good effort into capturing all outcomes in a unified place, compiling numbers, experiments, results. After a few days of more trial and error, we were capable of producing PCB prototypes with 208-pins fine-pitch QFP packages on both sides, with almost no scrap materials. Theodore Paul Wright2 was nodding in approval from a cloud. In time, we improved not only materials use and time but also the experience for whoever was operating the prototyping station: better lighting, better time keeping, better protection from chemicals, better cleaning. We eventually wrote a software tool (in VB6!) for guiding the occasional operator. Of course.
To be clear, I am not saying that the quality of our notes defined the outcome, but the fact we were getting better at it by doing AND the fact we organized our learnings in a more collaborative way did definitely change the game. It reduced the amount of time wasted trying things others had tried to no avail, and gave the possibility to better cross-check ideas and findings along the way. Here’s an experiment about notes: try journaling for a month; as in, write all the relevant happenings in your organization and the projects around you. If it’s a startup, you’ll have a good laugh when you read that journal few months down the road: so many things change, so many ideas appear and disappear. What was the thing few weeks back, it’s unholy now.
Companies are (or, should be at least) like fishing nets, capturing everything as they go, the wanted and the unwanted, the signal and the noise, and managing to “take proper notes” and sort out what is useful to keep versus what can be returned to the sea. Goes without saying, plenty of mistakes are made in the process, because mistakes must be made for they are the lighthouses which signal that it’s time to perhaps swerve away from current direction, possibly a collision course. The beauty of this is that competitors are also learning and getting better as you sleep: they will eventually figure things out just as you did. Time matters; you can’t take forever to learn. Even more beautiful is the fact that your competitors’ improvement will sooner than later affect you and force you to learn new things. As companies learn, peripheral things outside their core products or offerings improve as well: user experience, customer support, packaging, supply chain management, reliability.
Most of this sounds very obvious and could have been said by any random consultant out there. But here I am for something else: companies make great efforts to avoid showing to the outside their learning pains and that they have made (or are still making) mistakes. They put effort in making themselves look infallible and know-all, dressing everything as a win, whereas we all know the nuanced, objective reality is that some things must be indeed working awesome whereas other things must be at the “well, damn” stage. Granted, companies are opaque: we can’t see from outside what’s really happening. Sure, wanna make yourself look like you are the corporate equivalent of Mr Olympia? Go for it, as long as this silly posing is strictly done to external observers and not within office walls. Internally, learn by doing, learn fast, and take proper notes.
