Unblocked in 48 hours: When reverse engineering is the right answer

In product development, maintaining momentum is crucial. When a team gets blocked, the cost isn't just measured in project hours, but in lost focus and morale. Early in one of our medical device projects, our team faced a significant roadblock.

Our task was to perform crucial comparative testing against a key competitor's device. This data was needed for benchmarking our own performance and making critical design decisions. The problem was that the competitor's hardware was a "black box".

So I spent some time over the weekend analyzing the device's PCBs, and was able to reverse-engineer the hardware and replace the disk drive with my own. From there, I put together a simple Python script to control it.

This allowed us to benchmark the hardware and collect the data we needed to move forward.

The situation was a good reminder of what pragmatic leadership can mean in practice. It isn’t always about high-level strategy; sometimes the most effective way to lead is to recognize when to roll up your sleeves and directly remove an obstacle for your team. A willingness to apply hands-on skills to solve a tactical problem can make all the difference in keeping a project moving.