---
title: "Delete It Before You Optimize It"
date: 2026-03-07T10:44
author: Julien Reszka
description: "Elon Musk's first rule: make requirements less dumb. Second: delete the step. Optimization is third, and most people start there."
keywords: ["engineering", "productivity", "decision-making", "startups", "strategy"]
canonical: https://julienreszka.com/blog/delete-it-before-you-optimize-it/
---

# Delete It Before You Optimize It

Elon Musk's first rule: make requirements less dumb. Second: delete the step. Optimization is third, and most people start there.

Elon Musk's five-step improvement process is ordered deliberately, and the order is the insight.

1. **Make your requirements less dumb.** Every requirement has an owner, and that owner is probably wrong about at least one thing, regardless of how smart they are.
2. **Delete the part or process entirely.** If you are not occasionally adding things back in after deleting too aggressively, you have not deleted enough.
3. **Simplify or optimise.** Only here, in third position, does the word 'optimise' appear, because optimising a process that should not exist is waste disguised as progress.
4. **Accelerate cycle time.**
5. **Automate.**

Musk's own admission is that he has personally made the mistake of going in reverse: automating first, then accelerating, then simplifying, and paid for it. Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber makes the same point from a different angle: when Uber's mobility business lost 85% of its volume overnight at the start of the pandemic, the response was not careful deliberation. It was top-down and fast, because a decision that is twenty percent off but made immediately beats a perfect answer that arrives after the window has closed. The process question and the decisiveness question are the same: are you spending time on things that should not exist?

---

**Actionable insight:** Before optimizing anything, ask whether it should exist at all. If you cannot justify its existence independently, delete it. Only then simplify, accelerate, and automate, in that order.

## Key figure

**95%** — Reduction in cost per kilogram to orbit: Space Shuttle vs SpaceX Falcon 9 reusable

*Source: NASA, SpaceX Commercial Crew Program*

## Myth vs reality

**Myth:** Optimization is the path to efficiency

**Reality:** The most common engineering mistake is optimizing something that should not exist. Questioning the requirement is always step one.

*Source: Elon Musk, Tesla Shareholder Meeting, 2021*