First Principles Thinking: How Elon Musk Built SpaceX

First Principles Thinking: How Elon Musk Built SpaceX (PDF Worksheet Included)

In this issue:

• What is First Principles Thinking?
• Elon Musk And The Birth Of SpaceX
• How First Principles Thinking Works (The Mechanics)
• How You (as a Manager) Can Apply First Principles Thinking
• Download Your First Principles Thinking Worksheet!
• References
• Try This Simple Exercise

First Principles: How Elon Musk Built SpaceX

A few years ago, I found myself managing a project that was in chaos. We had a big feature in our software that was slated to be released to millions of customers, but the feature stopped working days before the release date.

Every passing day added pressure (and frustration) for me and my team. My team members (which included brilliant software engineers) did everything they could to identify the issue in the feature we were about to release, but nothing came out of it. It was a dead end.

That is when I decided to take a step back and go back to the drawing board. We drew out the architecture of not just the feature, but the entire system, drew out all the components and services, and listed out all our…