There’s an old physics joke. “How do you model a cow? Well, you start by assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum…”

I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve been in the design or planning phase of a complex engineering project, and invariably someone draws a simple block diagram on the whiteboard and proclaims, “There’s the solution right there. Easy!”

It’s like, ok that simplified diagram might be correct, but there’s a LOT of complexity inside each of those lines and boxes. In fact, a single box in your block diagram might actually be itself a super-complex project on its own, with tons of code to write and tons of integration to do.

A mentor of mine had a saying for this phenomenon. They would say, “Any problem looks simple from far enough away.” So when you are leading engineering efforts, especially where they may not be in your area of expertise, be mindful of oversimplifying the designs and assuming that just because you have a correct and complete block diagram that the project is “solved” and all that is left is implementation. Frequently those implementation details are themselves more time-consuming that you realize, or in fact may even have constraints and dependencies that change your high-level block diagram.