Jordan Kapitanoff went through Kettering University's co-op program and spent his first years at a fastener manufacturer in Rockford, Illinois - once the screw manufacturing capital of the world - watching where the parts ended up: cell phones, rail cars, airplanes. Two decades later he's a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt who has run applications engineering, process development, quality, engineering management, and operations, and is now co-founder of Coforge Technologies. He started applying lean to engineering processes before manufacturing ones, which is backwards from how it's usually taught, and it produced the finding this episode is built on: the engineering work was never the slow part.
We're actually not that bad at what we do. When we get on the work, we're pretty good, and we know what we're doing, and we're making good stuff. It's just all this waiting time in between.
In this episode:
Why every request you hand to another engineer costs a full day, and what twenty sequential requests do to a prototype schedule
How Jordan got a gruff laser operator who wanted nothing to do with him to hand over the knowledge that made a floor re-layout work
The move that turns a skeptic into your lead trainer, and why it only holds if he has something at stake
Why the people doing the work already know where the waste is, and why "this is just how we do it" is the sound of a problem nobody asked them to name
How a Torx recess actually gets into a screw head (upset forging off a wire coil, then roll threading, with no material removed)
Bonus Content:
An Underappreciated Skill: Taste
S7E23 Jordan Kapitanoff | Screw Manufacturing, LEAN Processes, and Investing for Engineers
Jordan Kapitanoff is a mechanical engineer turned operations leader, a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and co-founder of Coforge Technologies, an assembly and engineering services company he started after a string of acquisition deals fell through and he lost his job in the middle of them. In this episode he takes lean out of the textbook and puts it on the floor. He covers why waiting is the waste nobody prices, how a single request to another engineer reliably costs a day, why he applied lean to engineering processes before manufacturing ones, the specific sequence he used to turn an intimidating laser operator into the lead trainer on a new machine, what "internal customer" actually obligates you to, how screws are cold-forged off a wire coil, and why engineers' risk aversion keeps them from acting on things they've already analyzed to death. For any engineer who suspects their program is slow for reasons nobody has written down.
>If YouTube isn’t your thing, check out this episode and all of our past episodes on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.
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The people doing the work already know where the waste is. Getting it out of them is the actual job.
Jordan was leading a new laser install and a full floor relayout. The person whose input he most needed was the lead fiber laser operator, an older gentleman he describes as gruff, grumpy, and visibly uninterested in talking to anyone.
I'm going to make this guy my friend, because I need to know what he knows.
The sequence he ran is the part worth copying. It starts with proximity and no agenda - how you doing today, what's going on - and then narrows to the one question the operator is uniquely qualified to answer: what don't you like about the machine we're replacing? Every complaint became a line item Jordan carried to the equipment vendors, and every vendor answer came back to the operator as a real question about a real machine.
Then the step most engineers skip. Jordan didn't just consult him and move on.
I'm going to bring you in on this training. Now you're part of the team, but I'm also expecting some contribution from you. You're going to have to help me create this training plan. What do they need to know?
The reframe underneath it: the operator was the customer. Not the end user who buys the product - the person downstream of your decision who has to live inside it. Every design somebody has to assemble, every machine somebody has to run, every process somebody has to work in has one.
Jordan's read on why the knowledge stays buried is the uncomfortable part. Operators aren't hiding anything. They're executing exactly what they were told, correctly, and have no reason to think it's worth mentioning.
A Defect Worth Billions: The Story of Kevlar
Jordan spent years learning to read a floor by having operators correct him on decisions he'd already made. Nobody ever called that a skill, put it on his review, or taught it in a course, because judgment and production used to arrive together and only one of them was ever measured. That arrangement broke about three years ago. METR ran a randomized trial with 16 experienced developers across 246 real tasks: they finished 19% slower with AI tools and estimated afterward that they'd been 20% faster. Forty points of error, in experts, about their own work, in code they'd known for five years.
The article argues that recognizing quality in work you didn't produce is about to separate good engineers from bad ones, and lays out four practices for building it on purpose.
Read the full article on The Wave.
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