One of the best ways to keep an entire engineering team focused on the same goal, working together in an integrated, collaborative way, and being efficient with their efforts is to have a development roadmap.
Or, if we’re staying on-brand, a Development Flight Plan.
There’s a lot of steps that go into the Development Flight Plan if you’re wanting to cover the full product life cycle. These range from conceptual design to the final operational deployment, and even additional block variants further down the line. But those are all topics that deserve their own email discussions.
For now, I want to leave you with one main takeaway: please have a plan. It doesn’t need to be a pretty Gantt chart, or an extensive powerpoint, or anything that you’d actually show to an executive.
All it needs is to call out what your main development stages will be, the kind of resources you need at each, and the primary outputs from each stage—that is, your deliverables, whether they’re powerpoint slides, CAD files, or basic documented decisions.
I promise, having even the barest scaffolding of structure for your engineering effort will be worth it.