300: Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton
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Josh Tarbutton, Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication, is on a mission to restore the dignity of engineers and unleash their creative potential through intentional culture and agile structure.
We explore Josh’s journey from soldier and professor to engineering leader, and his Engagement Success Framework, which includes: Scoping/Visioning, Customer Communication, Resourcing, and Solution. Josh explains how this structured process allows Bravo Team to align deeply with client goals, unlock team creativity, and deliver complex, high-impact innovations with confidence. We also discuss how “grooming” a project helps avoid costly misalignments, how AI and Agile methods are transforming the engineering workflow, and why design for sustainability and accessibility will define the next frontier of innovation.
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Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Josh Tarbutton, former professor, soldier, and currently the Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication. Josh, welcome to the show.
Steve, glad to be here, thank you.
Well, I’m excited to have this conversation because your kind of firm has not been represented on the show for the last 300 episodes. So, we’re definitely gonna have some new insights and the new perspectives. We’ve never had an engineering consulting firm, I believe. And you also have a very inspiring “Why” of why you’re doing this. So let’s start with this. And would you share your personal “Why” and how you are manifesting it in Bravo Team?
Yes. So why Bravo Team or why do this? So I think there’s the truth that
if you want to create new things, you got to imagine them and put yourself in a position to create.
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And I think as engineers, we have that unique opportunity and in many of our careers to be the tip of the spear for creativity in our organizations. And, for me personally, seeing how soldiers are trained in the army, seeing how engineers are matriculated in academia and seeing the career paths that they end up with, I really feel like there’s a little bit of a mismatch in the market between what the engineer is really capable of and what they’re actually able to produce in an organization. And I would say that to the extent that there’s a blockage between the creative capacity of the engineer and the value that they could deliver, I feel like I kind of want to help that. And so what is that? Well, part of it has to do with like just the dignity of the engineer and how we understand the value contribution. And so part of my “Why” is I actually believe that if we actually have intentional conversations and we change some of the ways that we do things that we can get, we can allow people to be much more creative and we can have bigger budgets because we’re reducing waste in other areas and really make a dramatic impact into the way that we do design work.
Okay, so that is fascinating. And you mentioned the dignity of engineering. So, what is happening with the dignity of engineering? Why it needs to be restored?
So fundamentally, dignity is, I think, mostly just about respect. And I think, sometimes, when two people are having a conversation, our assumptions that we bring into the conversation can really take away from what the other person is saying. And I think that happens a lot in engineering, where the engineer is doing their best to try to communicate what needs to be communicated. And yet, there’s a little bit that’s lost in translation. So, then the engineer comes across as being a resistive or adding some restriction or creating problems or trying to slow things down. When in reality, I’d say almost all the time, these individuals are trying to help and reduce risk and increase the customer experience. And so there’s a little bit of this conflict between, I think, just in translation, between doing the design and development work the right way and then landing it in the marketplace. And we don’t really prepare engineers very well for the economics of manufacturing, design, production. And we don’t really always prepare leaders very well for what engineers are capable of and what they can do. And we certainly don’t create cultures, in my opinion, that foster engineers’ best work. And so I think we have a little bit of a problem culturally where the engineer is really kind of set to the side in a lot of industries. And I’ve seen this across the board. And I think we have an opportunity in the marketplace to just really unlock their power. And it’s really what it’s all about. So,
restoring the dignity of the engineers, really more about like unleashing their power for the organization, their creative power.
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I love that, unleashing the power of the engineer. So what does it take to unleash that power? How do you create a culture where engineers thrive and they can be creative and they can communicate better and play a bigger role in company?
I think it comes down to the culture, really, the culture that we build around development and innovation. I think the reason that it’s hard is because when a company decides to invest in new product offerings or the future or creating something, there’s often substantial risk. And so that pressure is often the financial pressure, the market pressure, hitting the timelines often, that business risk, it lands squarely on the development team. And yet, the development team is trying to create something from nothing. And so, there’s tremendous opportunity for people basically to attack each other. They feel afraid, they feel vulnerable. If the timeline or the budget is jeopardized. And so, this whole activity, if it’s not fostered in the right culture can blow up in people’s faces. And often, it is a source of friction. And I think we haven’t done a great job of resolving that. But I think,
primarily, the way you resolve it is is basically if you can understand what the creative and innovative process is fundamentally, and then basically nurture that process while people do development, then I think it'll go a long way to making…
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So, it sounds like it’s a combination of culture and structure, how you unleash the power of the engineers. Do I get this right?
Yeah, you can’t have one without the other.
So that’s a great segway because I’d like you to talk about this structure that you have developed, that Bravo Team, that helps you maximize the performance of your engineers and make them feel that they are self-actualizing as well. So would you walk us through this, I think it’s four stages, four stage process, maybe you call it the Engagement Success Framework or something like that. What does that look like for you guys?
Yes, we try to follow the design process and it’s a pretty typical service business arrangement. And I think, I’ll just pause there. Being a service business is a little bit unique because you’re constantly trying to optimize. You need really skilled individuals that you wanna meet their needs and retain. And then you have organizations that have business needs that those skilled individuals can meet. Those resources get sucked up really quickly. And as I say, every great engineer has a full time job. I mean, every great engineer is fully engaged, they’re not waiting around for work, they’re already busy. And so, how do you scale a business? How do you grow business? How do you execute on work in a service business? It’s highly dependent on the individual knowledge of that person. And so, what we have to do is be very c
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