Product Engineer - The Jack of All Trades
by Darren Ashby

In my experience with the big bad world, I have found that creating a successful product requires the application of multiple fields of discipline. It is rarely enough to do a good job with just the electrical parts of a design. Often there are mechanical aspects of the design that are overlooked. (Almost every circuit that I have seen for sale has to go into some kind of box.) However, good mechanical and electrical engineering are not the only things needed. You have to get your product to market at the right place and the right time to be successful. You cannot do this and only involve one person. Thus, Product Engineering requires some less scientific, but no less important, capabilities such as team management, forecasting, idea generation and general people skills.

So does this mean that the successful Product Engineer needs to know everything about everything? NO! But he or she must understand the basics of many disciplines. I had a professor in college who hammered the basics into us. He used to say, "All the major discoveries are just one or two steps above the basics." I think he was right. He taught that if you completely grasp the fundamentals of any given process, you can always derive all the higher functions. How many different equations did you learn in school to analyze a circuit? I'll bet it was upwards of 50. Do you remember them all? What if I told you that you really only needed to know 5 of them. Would that be much easier to learn and apply? You bet it would. And you know what else? You will make a lot less mistakes.

Now that gets me to the point of my column. I would like to teach the different fundamentals that I have learned to be a successful Product Engineer. So when you come here, who knows what you will find, it may be op-amps one week, team management the next and maybe a little ohm's law for flavor later on.

I welcome any questions or comments you may have. I will do my best to answer them. I do not profess to know all, so don't be surprised if I say "I don't know," but I will do my best to learn and teach. Who knows where the next great idea will come from! So, read on, and if I have done my job right, something inside your head will click and you will say to yourself, "Aha! Now I get it."

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