Creating Efficient Teams

Engineering projects are often driven by a sense of urgency—typically framed as “First to market wins.” I’ll leave it to Marketing to justify that claim. In my experience, that mindset is rarely how you build an efficient team that can reliably bring products to market—especially in regulated industries like Medical Devices and In Vitro Diagnostics.

Efficiency is not about speed alone. It’s about repeatability, quality, and control.

While I’m not one to lean heavily on sports analogies, there is a useful lesson in how coaches train athletes. Players don’t start by running full games. They drill fundamentals—basic movements, techniques, and decision-making—until those actions become instinctive. Only then do they put everything into play.

The same principle applies to engineering teams.

Teams that consistently succeed are trained in how the work is done before they’re judged on how fast they can do it. Projects should reinforce the correct way to work—not merely reward rapid execution.

This is especially true in medical device engineering. When building R&D or engineering teams, organizations often start by hiring excellent design engineers. And they should—those skills are essential. But strong technical capability does not automatically come with an understanding of technology management, systems engineering, or design controls.

That gap matters.

“Train first” sounds simple, but it requires knowing what to train. The reality is that many organizations don’t have anyone who truly understands systems engineering processes well enough to teach them. Instead, they search for a magic template—something that promises to impose order without requiring understanding.

Templates don’t create efficient teams.
Understanding does.