When I look back over my career, one conversation stands out as a turning point. I was a young engineer, head buried in tolerance calculations and CPK reports, arguing with a supplier over a dimension that—on paper—needed to be perfect. My manager, Taro Takamoto, interrupted the technical debate and said something simple and direct:
“An engineer can’t only think from an engineering or design point of view. Think from the business point of view. An engineer is a businessman.”
At the time it felt like a rebuke. In hindsight, it was a lecture in professional maturity.
From Detail to Context
Engineers are trained to love detail. It’s our superpower: we reason precisely about materials, tolerances, thermal expansion, and statistical process control. Those details matter. But they are only one layer of a much larger system: the product, its manufacturing, the supply chain, the programme schedule, the commercial targets, and—above all—the customer.
When we remain focused only on the technical layer, we risk three things:
- Solving the wrong problem. Technical elegance that misses what customers value is wasted effort.
- Over-engineering. Features and tolerances add cost and complexity with diminishing returns.
- Poor trade-offs. A technically optimal choice for one subsystem can create downstream headaches for manufacturing, service, or procurement.
Designing the Right Product
Thinking like a businessperson leads engineers to a different question: Are we building the right thing? That is, not simply a technically excellent component, but the product that meets customer needs, is affordable to produce, and is sustainable in the market.
Practically that means:
- Start with the customer. Talk to the product manager (or customer directly), observe how they use your product, and validate assumptions early.
- Define the minimum valuable solution. What is the smallest, lowest-cost change that delivers the customer benefit?
- Avoid feature creep. Extra features may sound attractive in a spec but often dilute value and add cost.
- Use metrics that matter. Measure adoption, usage, return rates, and customer satisfaction—not just engineering pass/fail.
- Plan the whole lifecycle from the start. That starts with a clear concept architecture: decide early which functions are core, which can be modularised, and where you accept variability. Predict the cost drivers and design so those costs are controllable. Consider manufacturability and assembly up front. Build in serviceability and diagnostics, and run structured thinking about potential failure modes before you lock the design.
What “Thinking Like a Businessperson” Actually Means
It isn’t a betrayal of engineering. It’s an elevation of it. Practically, it means:
- See the end-to-end system. How does this component affect assembly time, supplier selection, logistics, and after-sales service?
- Quantify trade-offs. If tighter tolerance reduces yield by 5% but adds 20% to cost, what’s the net value for the customer and the business?
- Prioritise impact. Where will engineering effort create the greatest value—reduced warranty claims, lower unit cost, faster release, or improved user experience?
- Talk business. Learn to translate technical metrics into commercial terms: cost per unit, revenue impact, customer satisfaction scores.
- Own the outcome. Engineers should not hand over “perfect” designs and vanish—we must follow through to production and field performance.
The Payoff
Engineers who think like businesspeople become multipliers. They speed up product launches, reduce waste, improve supplier relationships, and—crucially—ensure that the products we design actually deliver value to customers and to the company.
Taro’s short sentence has echoed through my decisions ever since. It’s a simple standard: pair your technical skills with commercial judgement. Be the person who sees both the drawing and the ledger, both the tolerance and the customer’s experience. That is how engineers become not only problem solvers, but creators of value.
Thank you, Taro!