The Work of a Chief Engineer: Inside Toyota’s Revolutionary Product Development System

The Work of a Chief Engineer is the first English-language account of Toyota’s product development system written by someone who actually held the job of chief engineer (CE). Naoto Kitagawa spent more than 30 years at Toyota, serving as CE for the Camry, bB, Avalon, Solara, and other vehicle programs, before going on to an executive role at Daihatsu. In this book, he opens up the CE role that has anchored Toyota’s product development for roughly 75 years — a role with enormous responsibility for a vehicle’s success but little formal authority over the thousands of engineers, designers, and suppliers who bring it to life.

Kitagawa builds the book around his own programs, starting with the bB, a youth-market vehicle that broke from Toyota’s conservative image and became a runaway hit. He walks through how he built the product concept from firsthand observation of young customers rather than market research alone, how he used the CE concept document to align every functional department behind his vision, and how the bB became the first high-volume vehicle developed without prototypes. From there, he lays out the mechanics of Toyota’s new-vehicle development process, the organizational structure that supports (and constrains) the CE, and the 17 principles he developed for the role — covering everything from cost management and schedule discipline to the stamina the job demands.

The book closes with reflections from other legendary CEs, including Tatsuo Hasegawa and Akihiro Wada, and Kitagawa’s own view on whether the CE system can survive the CASE (Connected, Autonomous, Shared, and Electric) era.

Who Benefits

Product development leaders, program managers, and engineers at any company that designs and manufactures physical products will find a practitioner’s playbook here — not an academic study of Toyota, but a firsthand account of how one person navigated the tradeoffs, politics, and pressure of leading a product from concept to launch. It will also interest anyone studying lean product development or Toyota’s management systems more broadly.

“The CE owns all system-level tradeoffs; no significant compromise happens without the CE’s judgment… we have never had — until Kitagawa’s account — a clear window into how all of that truly unfolds from the inside.”

— James Morgan and John Shook, from the Foreword