SpaceX's 5-step Engineering Process

Hidden behind what sound like individually interesting ideas is a whole lot of exhortation to do early optimization. That is seldom if ever more productive

If you click through to the interview with Elon, he cites the elimination of a fiberglass mat in the Tesla battery pack. He makes it sound clever, but the fact a mat without a clear purpose was there to begin with was a failure to manage specs. Nobody knew who specified it. Obv someone did. But when you lose knowledge like that, you're not clever for fixing it later.

Elon's anecdote also points to chaos and turnover as causes for losing that knowledge. If you work for a mercurial manager who fires people on a whim, how likely are you to observe proper change management in the spec process instead of hoarding knowledge for your own job security?

Elon is reinventing processes that have better existing instatiations.