Throughout his career as a pioneering product designer, Doug Field’s work has influenced the experience of anyone who has used a MacBook Air, ridden a Segway or driven a Tesla Model 3.
But his latest project is also his most ambitious yet: a recreation of one of the most iconic high-tech creations of the last century: the Ford Motor Company.
As Ford’s chief electric vehicle, digital and design officer, Field is tasked with leading the company’s electric vehicle development as well as building the new software platform that will power all Ford vehicles.
To lure Ford Motor Co. toward a digital and electric future, Field has actually led a growing startup within the historic automaker. “It’s hard to figure out how to do a ‘startup’ within a large organization,” he acknowledges.
If anyone can do that, it’s probably Field, who has focused on creating the conditions that foster innovation ever since he attended MIT’s Global Operations Leadership program (then called Effective Leadership) to study organizational behavior and strategy.
“The natural state of an organization is to innovate, create small teams, go upstream, and make things harder and harder,” he says. To overcome these forces, Field has mastered the art of selecting diverse, talented teams and helping them succeed in large, complex companies.
“It’s important to create a creative environment where big ideas can emerge,” he said. “The other is creating an environment that fosters performance where things get accomplished. I’m fascinated by this question, and throughout my career I’ve thought about how the two can work together.”
After 30 years as a development engineer at Ford Motor Co., Field now had the opportunity to combine Ford’s manufacturing prowess with the bold approach that helped redesign Apple’s laptop and develop Tesla’s Model 3. His mission was to completely reinvent the way cars were made and driven.
“Just making something or doing something isn’t going to change the world,” he said. “If you want to have a big impact, you need people who can turn things around and people who can build it.”
A passion for design
Field has been a car enthusiast since he was a child. “I love cars and vehicles in general,” he said. “I see cars as the intersection where all of my interests intersect because they’re where technology, art and human design meet.”
The son of an artist and musician mother and an engineer father, Field says his parents instilled in him a lifelong passion for both the aesthetic and technical elements of product design: “I think I was drawn to cars because of the aesthetic appeal of the product,” he says.
Field joined Ford in 1987 after earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. At the time, the Detroit auto giant was good at mass-producing cars but didn’t encourage or reward creative thinking, and Field was frustrated by the “overly structured, bureaucratic” management culture he encountered.
The experience was sometimes frustrating, but also valuable and enlightening: He realized he wanted to work for a fast-growing technology company.
“At the time, I wasn’t interested in solving driving engineering problems in the automotive industry,” he says. “I wanted to work with passionate people and build something that had never existed before, in an environment where talent and innovation were valued, and where rudeness was an asset, not a liability. When I read about Silicon Valley, I loved the way they talked about things.”
During that time, Field took two years off to enroll in MIT’s LGO program to hone his engineering skills and explore ideas for manufacturing processes and team innovations that could help him in the future.
“Some of the core skills I developed there are really important in production lines and manufacturing processes,” he says. He studied systems engineering and used Monte Carlo simulation to model complex manufacturing environments. During an internship at aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, he worked on automated design in computer-aided design (CAD) systems long before those techniques became standard practice.
Another powerful tool he learned was probability and statistics, studied under the tutelage of Professor Alvin Drake in MIT’s legendary course 6.041/6.431 (Stochastic Systems Analysis). Field applied these insights to manufacturing processes as well as to explain people’s changing aptitudes, work styles, and talents to help build better, more innovative teams. And his study of organizational strategy sparked a lifelong interest in “how to think of innovation as an outcome, rather than as a trait of genius.”
“I was very fortunate to have been exposed to so many things at MIT that gave me a foundation that helped me get through difficult situations later on,” Field said.
Learn while you lead
After leaving Ford in 1993, Field worked for three years at Johnson & Johnson Medical, where he developed medical treatments and met Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who was working on a project called iBOT, a gyroscope-powered wheelchair that could climb stairs.
When Kamen spun off Segway to develop a new personal transportation device using similar technology, Field became his first hire and served as the company’s chief technology officer for nearly a decade.
Segway combines Field’s interests in vehicles, technology, innovation, process and human-centered design.
“To think about working on electric cars right now, it really feels like a gift,” he said. The problems they solved foreshadowed the problems he would later solve at Tesla and Ford. “The Segway is really the precursor to the modern electric car. It’s completely software-controlled, it has redundant high-voltage batteries, traction control, brushless DC motors. It’s basically a mini-Tesla from the year 2000.”
At Segway, Field has assembled an “incredible” team of engineers and designers who share his passion for pushing boundaries: “Segway is the first place where I can personally select everyone who works with me and define the culture and mission.”
At the same time that he was demonstrating leadership, he was also preoccupied with solving another difficult problem: misjudging people.
“A fundamental part of Silicon Valley’s structure is to embrace talent rather than the traditional ways of evaluating talent within an organization,” he said. “If you want to innovate, you have to learn how to manage neurodiverse people and people with different personalities, which is very different from a big company.”
Field still keeps the original Segway in his office as a reminder of what can be accomplished with a team that pays attention to detail.
Before joining Apple in 2008, he showed his future colleagues components, with their clean lines and packaging where every little piece fit together. “They said, ‘All right, you’re one of us,'” he recalled.
He was quickly promoted to vice president of hardware development for all Mac computers, leading the development teams for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, eventually overseeing more than 2,000 employees. “Building something that’s really simple and elegant, and thinking about the product as a unified whole, that’s why I came to Apple.”
The challenge of giving the MacBook Air its signature thin and light form factor is one example.
“The MacBook Air was the first consumer electronics product to be mass-produced from a CNC-machined case,” Field said. He worked with his industrial design and engineering teams to come up with a way to eliminate two-thirds of the parts used in the iMac and build the laptop from a single block of aluminum. “We cut away the material so that all the screws and electronics were integrated, and that allowed us to make the product very small and thin.”
“When I interviewed Apple’s legendary head of design, Jonathan Ive, he said that the ability to shrink and expand is the most important ability for an Apple leader.” That means thinking more broadly about “the overall spirit of this product and how it impacts the world,” and thinking even broader, thinking deeply about, for example, the physical shape of the laptop itself and how it feels in the user’s hand.
“My attention to detail and passion for product, design and technology are directly reflected in my work at Tesla,” he said. When Field joined Tesla in 2013, he was fascinated by how the bold startup was transforming its approach to car manufacturing. “Tesla has put digital technology into cars in a way that no one else has. They’re saying, ‘We’re not a Silicon Valley car company. We’re a Silicon Valley company that happens to make cars.'”
Field built and led the team that built the Model 3, Tesla’s most affordable car designed for the mass market.
This experience reinforces the importance and power of defining a designer’s scope of work in a way that captures a holistic view of the workforce.
“You need to have a broad understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish and everyone in the organization understands what that means to them,” he says. “You need to have a deep understanding of the business to bring it all together, but at the same time, you need to be very calm and focused. That’s T-shaped leadership.”
He believes his experience at LGO laid the foundation for the “T-shaped leadership style” he practices.
“My MIT education allowed me to go out there and really focus, learn as much as I could, teach as much as I could, and then when things started to look up, I was able to step back and really focus on the areas where the organization needed to grow and the areas that were at risk.”
The power of combining scale with a “startup mindset”
Field returned to Apple as vice president of special projects in 2018. “When production of the Model 3 and Model Y began to scale up, I left Tesla because there were people better than me who could handle high-volume production,” he said. “I returned to Apple with the hope that what I learned at Tesla might help Apple expand into other markets.”
That market was his first love: cars. For three years, Field has quietly been leading Apple’s electric car project.
Then came a call from Ford CEO Jim Farley, who showed Field how much the company had changed since he first worked there and convinced him to return later in 2021.
“Two things became clear,” Field said. “One was humility. Our success was not guaranteed.” That attitude was quite different from Field’s previous experience in Detroit, where he encountered managers who resisted change. “The other was urgency. Jim and Bill Ford told me the same thing: ‘It’s going to take four or five years to completely turn this company around.'”
“I said, ‘If the company’s management really believes in this, then maybe the auto industry is ready for what I want to achieve.'”
To this day, Field remains inspired and motivated by the drive for innovation he experienced at Ford.
“If you can combine what Ford is really good at with what Tesla and Rivian are good at, that’s worth considering,” Field said. “Skunk Works has become one of the foundational tools of my career,” he said. Skunk Works is an industry term for projects run by small, autonomous teams within a larger organization.
Ford has been working with a “Skunk Works” team for the past two years to develop a new low-cost, software-enabled EV platform that would allow all of the vehicle’s sensors and components to be operated from a central digital operating system. The company also plans to build new sedans, SUVs and small pickup trucks on this new platform.
With other traditional automakers like Volvo racing into an electric future and stiff competition from big EV makers like Tesla and Rivian, Field and his colleagues will have plenty of challenges ahead.
If successful, his latest chapter, building on decades of learning and leadership from LGO to Silicon Valley, could transform the way we drive and secure Ford a position as a leader in electric vehicles.
“I was lucky enough to feel good about what I was doing and be able to write a book about it,” Field said. “This is a really big thing for Ford and the American auto industry and American industry.”
