Hardware team alignment is easy to talk about and hard to achieve.

Most engineering organizations already know they need better communication. They know hardware, software, systems, manufacturing, and leadership all need to stay in sync. They know documentation matters. They know product teams and technical teams should not be rowing in opposite directions. Yet across hardware development, the same frustration keeps resurfacing: smart people, good intentions, real effort, and still the project drifts. Deadlines stretch. Priorities blur. Teams begin solving different versions of the same problem.

Jacob Freking, an RF wireless systems engineer whose work has spanned antenna design, testing, performance analysis, integration, and startup execution, offers a useful way of understanding the problem. In his view, breakdowns often begin less with incompetence than with conflicting definitions of success. Engineers can be strong. Leaders can be serious. Stakeholders can be rational. A program still stalls if everyone is optimizing for something slightly different.

“It seems like it’s a misalignment between whatever leadership on that program is and their end stakeholders.”

That sentence is stronger than it looks. Freking is not making a generic complaint about workplace communication. He is naming a specific engineering failure mode. A stakeholder may want something fast, useful, and good enough to learn from. A leadership team shaped by older, more rigid programs may still define success as exhaustive documentation, maximum rigor, and getting everything right the first time. Each of those positions has internal logic. Trouble begins when both remain active, implicit, and unresolved.

Good engineers can still build a misaligned organization

One of the most valuable things in Freking’s interview is his refusal to flatten the issue into blame. He does not describe failing teams as lazy or unserious. He describes them as receiving mixed signals. A group may be told to move quickly while also being managed according to habits built for a slower and more conservative environment. A team may be told iteration matters, then judged as if first-pass perfection were the true goal. Those tensions do not just create stress. They create engineering waste.

“The stakeholders may want something done fast… they want it to work, but they care about just getting something that checks most of the boxes fast.”

“If you bring in a leadership team that has worked on legacy programs where their experiences [are] in getting things done right, no matter how long it takes, that still ends up being their goal.”

From there, the problem spreads downward. Hardware engineers, software teams, and systems people each begin reading the project through different incentives. Reviews become less about deciding and more about translating. Documentation grows, but clarity does not necessarily grow with it. Nobody is exactly wrong. Nobody is fully aligned either.

Freking’s larger point is uncomfortable because it is so ordinary: hardware team alignment rarely fails in a dramatic moment. More often, it erodes through unspoken mismatches in pace, acceptable risk, and what counts as “done.” That matches a broader systems-engineering reality. NASA’s systems engineering guidance describes the systems engineer as the person responsible for directing, communicating, monitoring, and coordinating the technical team, while balancing technical, cost, and schedule interactions across a complex system. In the same guidance, NASA stresses that a systems approach must integrate hardware, software, and human systems integration rather than treat them as separate concerns.

Alignment is not soft. It is technical.

A lot of technical cultures still treat alignment as if it belongs to the “people side” of the business rather than the engineering side. Freking’s interview points in the opposite direction. He comes across as a deeply technical person, yet one of his clearest observations is that execution depends on whether the team actually shares the same care-abouts.

“It’s just like deciphering the care abouts for whoever you’re doing the project for.”

“Better you that defined the better you can execute.”

That is not management jargon. It is a design constraint. Every hardware program already works inside explicit constraints like power, geometry, manufacturability, cost, and schedule. Freking is arguing that organizational clarity belongs in the same category. If the team does not know whether it is optimizing for learning speed, risk minimization, documentation completeness, or pure performance, then technical decisions will keep fragmenting.

His own career helps explain why he sees the problem so clearly. Freking describes RF work as a place where he gets “the best of all the different kinds of problems” and where he becomes “a center point” in system design discussions, speaking with embedded teams, software algorithm people, signal processing groups, and other RF specialists. Someone working from that position sees more than local excellence. He sees interface quality. He sees where the handoffs fail. He sees where teams stop hearing one another.

Iteration is where alignment gets tested

Freking’s sharpest line on team behavior may be this one:

“You’re always going to learn something the first time around. And the faster that you learn it, the faster you can iterate on that and get it right.”

That sentence belongs at the center of any serious discussion of hardware team alignment. Teams that genuinely agree on iteration can make faster, cleaner decisions. Teams that talk about iteration while secretly judging themselves by first-pass perfection tend to choke their own learning loops.

Hardware makes this tension worse because real systems are expensive, physical, and often slower to revise than software. The temptation, then, is to overprotect the first version. A mature team does the opposite. It protects the learning value of the first version. Freking says plainly that “that’s never going to be the case” when discussing the fantasy that everything will work perfectly the first time. He is not dismissing rigor. He is rejecting a false premise that harms execution.

His comments elsewhere in the interview reinforce the same philosophy. While discussing design optimization, he says engineers need to know when to call something “good enough” and move to the next step, because over-optimizing for a reality that hardware will never achieve is its own kind of error. The same logic applies to teams. Alignment does not mean building a perfect organization chart or a flawless process map. It means creating enough shared direction that the next iteration teaches something useful.

Hardware alignment breaks at the interfaces

Cross-functional alignment sounds abstract until it touches an actual interface. Then it becomes painfully concrete.

A hardware team may need one pace. A software team may need another. Manufacturing may care about one category of risk while systems engineering worries about another. Freking and Cody explicitly discuss this broader pattern of misalignment between departments, including hardware and software teams moving at different tempos or with different development goals. Cody notes that this problem comes up constantly across hardware interviews, and Freking agrees that strong leaders need both technical grounding and an understanding of how people work if they are going to align everyone in the right direction.

“You have to have some technical experience to be able to get everybody aligned in the right direction, but you really need to just be able to convince everybody that that direction is the right direction.”

That idea deserves emphasis. Hardware team alignment is not solved by charisma alone, nor by process alone. Purely interpersonal leadership is not enough. Purely technical leadership is not enough either. What Freking points toward is a hybrid competence: enough technical understanding to know what the tradeoffs mean, and enough human understanding to help a team accept the tradeoff that matters now. NASA’s systems engineering guidance frames this in similar terms, describing systems engineering as the art and science of balancing organizational, cost, and technical interactions with a broad crosscutting view rather than a single-discipline view.

Engineering education already points in this direction

One reason this problem keeps recurring is that many engineers are trained to value technical excellence more visibly than collaborative coherence. Yet engineering education standards increasingly recognize that high-level technical work requires both. ABET’s current accreditation criteria say engineering programs are meant to foster the “systematic pursuit of improvement” in a “dynamic and competitive environment.”

Freking’s own educational reflections deepen the point. He argues that real engineering competence extends far beyond the undergraduate baseline and that much of the most important learning happens on the job, where systems, constraints, and interpersonal realities become unavoidable. He is also open to more self-taught pathways precisely because working engineers need to keep learning continuously rather than treating formal education as the end of formation.

Taken together, those views suggest a useful reframing: hardware team alignment is not a secondary workplace virtue. It is part of engineering maturity. The engineer who understands the interface between subsystems but not the interface between teams is still missing part of the system.

What better hardware team alignment looks like

Freking does not offer a single silver bullet, and that makes his view more credible rather than less. Alignment is difficult because every serious program contains competing pressures: schedule, budget, technical ambition, stakeholder expectations, and team dynamics. Cody puts it well in the interview when he says a technical leader may have “five quarters to spend,” while budgeting wants three and product wants four. Freking’s response is modest but telling: you choose what is best at the time.

For hardware teams, that means a few practical truths.

Shared priorities matter more than abstract agreement. Teams do not need to love every tradeoff. They do need to understand which one governs the current phase.

Iteration needs protection. Learning speed collapses when first-pass perfection becomes the hidden standard.

Interface ownership cannot stay vague. Someone has to own the translation layer between hardware, software, systems, and leadership.

Technical leadership has to be legible. Engineers follow decisions more readily when they can see the reasoning, not just the authority.

Freking is compelling here because he never leaves the world of real engineering. He does not turn alignment into motivational language. He keeps it tied to execution.

Why this matters for Hardware Rich Development

Freking’s interview belongs comfortably inside Hardware Rich Development because it treats engineering as both physical and social. Hardware is made of geometries, materials, tolerances, measurements, and power budgets. It is also made of handoffs, assumptions, role boundaries, and the quality of communication between people trying to build under pressure. His perspective is valuable because he understands that those realities are not separate. They are part of the same system.

A lot of teams are not suffering from a shortage of intelligence. They are suffering from too many silent optimization functions running at once. Freking names that cleanly. He gives the problem a technical shape. Better still, he points toward the real fix: define the care-abouts, align around them, and let iteration do its work.

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