Senior Management Crisis
During the final months before our scheduled tape-out for our first digital baseband ASIC, our VP Engineering unexpectedly took a five month emergency sabbatical. This event required the company to address these questions:
- Who would lead the technical community while the VP of Engineering was on sabbatical?
- Who would finish negotiating the renewal terms of our expiring CAD Tool licenses? Tools which were essential to enabling us to complete the physical design and verification of our chipset.
- Would we be able to finish the baseband chip design, verification, and backend operations in time to meet our scheduled tape-out, as well as convince our investors to provide us with the next round of funding?
Actions Taken:
After discussions with the company's Founder/President and Co-founder/CTO, they agreed to my becoming the interim VP of Engineering. In this capacity, I initiated these actions:
- communicated immediately to the engineering community:
- the reason for the VP of Engineering's emergency sabbatical;
- my role and expectations as interim VP Engineering;
- the importance our founders and investors placed upon the engineering team meeting its scheduled tape-out date (i.e. "Miss the tape-out date, lose the next round of funding and cease to exist as a company.")
- iniated daily, stand-up meetings with the engineering community to
- review the previous day's progress against our schedule;
- provide a heads-up to senior management regarding any nascent problems
- communicate to the whole engineering community what each team (RF, Baseband, MAC, Software, Hardware) would be working on that day.
- negotiated a 3-year subscription payment plan with our CAD tool vendor, which:
- resulted in our realizing a savings of $4.8M over the life of the subscription
- enabled quarterly payments instead of a lump sum payment up front.
- increased the Chip Design, Verification, and "Back-end" engineers' accessibility to the tools they needed, when they needed them, for as long as they needed them.
Results:
As a result of our daily stand-up meetings, more flexible access to our Semiconductor CAD Tool Suite, and, most importantly, the hardwork and dedication of the engineering team, we were able to meet our "tape-out" deadline and secure our next round of $20M venture capital funding.