NU Alum Jennifer Wei on Operational Excellence for Project, Product, and Program Management

We were lucky to have Master of Engineering Management (MEM) and NU Mechanical Engineering alum Jennifer Wei talk in our Operations Excellence class.

She gave an overview of how her view of operations excellence has evolved as she’s progressed in her career and through various project, product, and program management roles. Here are some highlights:

First job: She started out working on off-shore oil rigs. Her view of operational excellence started and ended with safety.

Second job: She moved from the oil industry to high-tech hardware. Here, she realized that in addition to safety, business metrics mattered. To be valuable to the business, the project and product managers must watch critical metrics.

Post master’s degree: After her master’s degree, as a management consultant and later at other firms, she realized that operational excellence meant setting up streamlined processes and getting them to stick.

In an AI product management role: Recently, as she’s seen how AI tools can speed up product development, she’s realized that the role of a product manager is even more critical. In this fast-paced environment, the product manager must get even better at saying “no.” The product can go off track much faster. She said that if the traditional PM to engineers ratio was 1:8, with AI, it should be 1:4. The aspiring PMs in the class liked this ratio!

As a business leader: As she rose as a manager, she realized the importance of people to maintaining excellence. She made a great point that you need to be equally mindful of the people who are your customers (they are driving the business) and your employees. Without your employees, you can’t serve your customers.

The Q&A was good.

One of the students asked how you brought your team along. Jennifer stressed the importance of working on alignment. People need to be aligned on the goals and scope of the project or product.

Since we opened the class to anyone on campus, we were lucky to have another MEM alum and long-time project manager for Abbott Labs, Annette Johnston, attend. Annette strongly agreed about the people side of operations excellence. In a recent podcast, you can hear Annette’s ideas on the importance of working with people and managing risk as a project manager.

After the talk, when it was just the regular class, we also covered the podcast from Planview with my friend and former boss, Razat Gaurav. In this interview, Razat talked about how ideas from Goldratt’s The Goal relate to software and product development. You might want to check out that podcast, too.

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