I recently had the opportunity to share my thoughts on engineering leadership with EngineerJobs.com, the most-visited engineering career site online. It's a tricky and dare-I-say controversial topic, not the milquetoast subject you might imagine. The innate traits required to be a successful leader balanced against the learned ones, the nature vs the nurture, and the importance of technical skills in a role that traditionally is heavy on soft skills - I touch upon them all and more.

Since I've been making them lately in preparation for the Cookie Dunker (that's the working name, at least, but maybe I should come up with a code name....) I thought I'd talk a little about what a Bill of Materials (B.O.M. or BOM) is, why they're important, and how they're used. Basically, the best analogy for a B.O.M. is that it is the complete and total recipe for making a product, all the way from the tiniest little screw, to the last little piece of Scotch tape on the outside of the box. It is important to include everything in the B.O.M., because by Murphy's law, if it's not on the B.O.M., something will inevitably be forgotten or misplaced until it's discovered at the least opportune moment.