Design like Elon Musk using 6 fundamental principles
By: Matt Neut
Tags: Product Design, UX, Spacex, Product Development, Elon Musk

This example seems trivial, yet it happens all the time. Unfortunately, not applying this principle often leads to added complexity in a design, which has a rippling effect on cost, time, and quality.

The main objective is to question constraints you are given to solve a problem because it is most likely that these are to some degree wrong. Elon questions nearly everything, most notably about what can or cannot be done in terms of cost to space, as I will elaborate in the next section. Also see Elon talk about this here.

The best way to apply this principle is whenever someone asks you to solve a problem, to dig deeper into the constraints you are given. Spend time to see if they are asking the wrong question. You may see a solution that does not require solving the problem but preventing it in the first place. Therefore, the benefits of this principle are strongly amplified if everyone is a chief engineer as well.

Reason from first principles

For anyone who’s heard or seen interviews with Musk, he commonly mentions reasoning from first principles as the best approach for solving problems. The approach is a subset of the scientific method and typically used by physicists to acquire knowledge correctly.

The idea is to boil a problem down to chunks of which you know are fundamentally true. This sounds easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult. It requires digging deep into your assumptions, disregarding legacy, and earlier failures.

A great example that Elon himself uses, is to estimate the cost of a rocket launch. Pre-SpaceX era, rocket launches would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Questioning the question would be to challenge this statement of cost in the first place. Reasoning from first principles means to figure out the fundamental cost of a rocket launch.

Say that for whatever reason you need a lot of launches. One approach would be to look at the cost per launch, multiply by the number of launches and get an estimate. A typical business person would probably negotiate the price of multiple launches from a rocket company. A typical corporate manager or purchaser could say something like “make every part of the rocket X percent cheaper”.

The fundamental limit of cost per launch is the cost of fuel, not the cost of hardware. Photo by SpaceX

These approaches sound reasonable, but they all miss the most crucial question: what is the fundamental cost? When you do the math on the cost of the raw materials of a rocket (some metals, fuel and oxidizer, hydraulic fluids, and so on), you realize that the propellant is only a tiny fraction of the total costs, which determines the fundamental lower limit of costs per launch. Conclusion: you need a reusable rocket.

Instead of immediately focusing on how something could be solved (as in the examples earlier), you first and foremost focus on what you fundamentally need or want. Only after that is when you start figuring out how to get that done. That is Musk’s reasoning.

Kill your darlings

This phrase, attributed to William Faulkner or Arthur Quiller-Couch, is an amazing statement that helps past difficult design decisions time and again. Originally it was recommended to writers, whenever they had a great passage that — although great — did not fit or even weakened the full story. As a writer, you’ve “fallen in love” with what you wrote and are reluctant to say goodbye to it, even though it’s better for the whole.