The Lean Enterprise Institute is pleased to announce the upcoming publication of The Work of a Chief Engineer: Inside Toyota’s Revolutionary Product Development System by Naoto Kitagawa this month. The author, a former chief engineer at Toyota, takes you inside Toyota’s acclaimed product development system, sharing proven principles and lessons that any company can adapt to reliably create profitable, high-quality products that customers will actually want to buy. You’ll learn the flow of product development, the organizational structure, how work is conducted, and the required qualities of a chief engineer. For leaders who are familiar with lean product and process development and beginners, this book will be an incredible resource.
In anticipation of the publication’s release, we’re sharing Jim Morgan and John Shook’s Foreword below.
We are excited to introduce this book, revealing for the first time in English the first-hand account of a Toyota chief engineer.
Naoto Kitagawa served as chief engineer (CE) for multiple programs across a distinguished career spanning more than 30 years at Toyota. During that time, Kitagawa served as the CE for the Camry, bB, Avalon, Solara, and many more vehicles. He also worked as a product planning leader before serving as an executive at Daihatsu. Consequently, Kitagawa’s story is at its core a practitioner’s account—not academic theory—of what it is like to sit in the CE’s chair and bear full responsibility for the success or failure of a vehicle program.
The CE has stood at the very heart of the Toyota Product Development System for about 75 years. Over those decades, occasional accounts of successful Toyota CEs reached the outside world: what they do, how they think, and why the system they anchor is the envy of the automotive world. But the one thing we have not had is the inside story from someone who actually was a Toyota CE—until now.
To fully appreciate the importance of this book, it helps to recall what has already been broadly, if superficially, known—and what has remained somewhat mysterious about the CE’s role. The CE orchestrates a powerful development capability that cuts horizontally across Toyota’s deep functional organization. But the CE leads with remarkably little direct authority over the thousands of engineers, designers, planners, and suppliers working to bring a product to life. The CE must develop an almost obsessive understanding of the target customer and then translate that understanding into a compelling product concept—a vision that will guide every decision from the first sketch to the final production sign-off.
The Toyota Chief Engineer
The CE owns all system-level tradeoffs; no significant compromise happens without the CE’s judgment, and the CE is simultaneously empowered by and entirely dependent on the larger organizational system for success. Those characteristics have been known generally, but we have never had—until Kitagawa’s account —a clear window into how all of that truly unfolds from the inside.
How does a CE accomplish all that?
Kitagawa begins answering that question by sharing the story of his assignment as CE for the bB, a youth-oriented, unique, boxy vehicle that would challenge everything Toyota was known for. Conservative, reliable, and efficient were Toyota’s watchwords. The bB was bold, expressive, and exciting to a generation of young Japanese buyers who saw little of themselves in their parents’ Corollas.
Kitagawa’s account of how he approached this challenge is instructive precisely because it refuses abstraction. He did not convene focus groups or commission reports. He went to where young people were—their hangouts, music venues, gathering places—and he listened and watched. He built his product concept from the ground up, from real human insight rather than from market data alone.
From there, Kitagawa takes us inside the process of the CE concept document—the structured mechanism by which the CE’s vision is shared, tested against, and ultimately aligned with the functional departments whose expertise will be needed to realize it. This is one of the least-understood elements of the Toyota system, and Kitagawa’s account of how he navigated it—the conversations, negotiations, moments of genuine alignment, and moments of stubborn resistance—is invaluable.
He also describes the bB program’s pioneering zero-prototype initiative, a response to the tight budget constraints that attended a youth-market vehicle, and one that required every downstream department to trust the CE’s concept and the digital tools of the era more than any Toyota program had previously asked them to.
Outside interest in Toyota’s Product Development System has never matched the fervent curiosity afforded to the Toyota Production System. Perhaps one reason for that has been that there were so many things the outside world could not fully see—textures of experience, moments of doubt and clarity, the specific human drama that lies behind the system’s elegant architecture. That is now changed with The Work of a Chief Engineer: Inside Toyota’s Revolutionary Product Development System, as Naoto Kitagawa reveals with engaging stories and profound insights, the remarkable world of the CE.
We expect this book to spark a wave of deep interest in Toyota’s product development and chief engineer system, leading to radically improved performance for companies and better products for customers.
James Morgan, PhD
Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI); former COO Rivian Automotive; former Global Director of Body and Stamping Engineering, Ford Motor; coauthor The Toyota Product Development System; coauthor Designing the Future
John Shook
Senior Advisor and former CEO LEI; former manager, Toyota Motor Corporation (Japan, Georgetown, KY, Ann Arbor, MI), Toyota Production System Support Center; former faculty, University of Michigan Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering; author, Managing to Learn, coauthor Learning to See; Kaizen Express
