In December 2021, I read the special edition of Germany‘s Automobilwoche on „The Tesla Principle“ and was hoping to find some answers on the question "How does product development, systems engineering and PLM work at Tesla?". This article summarizes my findings including feedback I got on the original post. If you have additional insights to share, please feel free to comment here or in the original post.
The articles cover sales, marketing, production, Elon Musk etc. - but not product development. Even a Google search doesn‘t reveal much but some job postings from Tesla asking for skills in Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE, CATIA, ENOVIA, DELMIA, SIMULIA and Solidworks applications. The related press release from Dassault Systemes on this is from September 2010...
Although Tesla is very secretive about their way of doing things, the articles give some insights into product development at Tesla. Here are my takeaways:
1. Tesla designed their products from the ground up without restictions from existing platforms, production technology etc.. They especially had a Silicon Valley mindset with focus on software and E/E architecture. But they still needed to design and build a mechanical car around the software.
2. They have created an integrated System of Systems – from battery cells over charging infrastructure and powerwalls to actual power production. I am not sure if this is the result of great systems engineering, but it certainly turned out well.
3. Tesla has a culture of innovation rather than cost-cutting
4. Having a tech-savvy CEO and flat hierarchies certainly helps. According to Elon Musk „pace of innovation is all that matters in the long run“
Agile@Tesla
And then, there ist the agile way of working at Tesla that not only applies to product development, but to the whole company including suppliers. As pointed out by Oliver Wörl and documented by Joe Justice in several videos, one cannot underestimate the importance of agile at Tesla:
- Agile-native company with iterations of 3-6 hours and empowered people
- An error culture that is required to operate at this speed
- Data-driven processes - e.g. all cars providing data constantly on usage patterns, issues, preferences etc. Analytics is then applied to direct and prioritize the agile work.
- Focus on building cars, almost as if product development is not separate from manufacturing but part of the iterative processes. Small iterations are deployed immediately to production (CI / CD = continuous integration / deployment), i.e. a pretty direct integration between product development and manufacturing almost in an "ETO = engineering to order" model as opposed to the mass production model in other OEM's. This can imply individual homologation testing of each car at the end of the production process.
- No meetings, just online chat. And no Powerpoint presentations.
Note: I published this article originally on LinkedIn.
