Aerospace execution is shaped by the friction between how programs are sold and how they are actually built. Commitments are often made years before integration risk is fully understood, while regulatory, supply chain, and organizational realities surface much later. Leadership judgment shows up in that gap, not in ideal conditions, but in deciding what can move now without creating failures downstream.
“How do we innovate quickly and still give customers what they need right now when internal or external realities mean the work may still take six months or a year to deliver?” asks Samantha McCue, an engineering and business leader.
The friction, McCue argues, is structural more often than it is technical. “In larger organizations and regulated industries, the overhead and internal processes often prevent teams from moving quickly.” McCue, a Director at an aerospace engineering firm supporting aerospace product development, has spent her career operating inside that tension. Trained as an aerospace systems engineer and seasoned by hands-on entrepreneurial work outside the industry, she challenges a common false choice in engineering organizations: rigor and speed are not opposites, but they do compete for attention.
“Although I’m an engineer and although I would love to have the 95% solution, most days, the 70, 75% solution is absolutely okay,” McCue says. “And that’s actually what moves the ball forward faster.” The leader’s job is to actively manage that trade, deciding where precision is mandatory and where rapid progress matters more.
Two worlds, one operating system
McCue came up in aerospace with the mindset most engineers are trained to bring to complex systems: attention to detail and careful iteration. “The problems are extremely complex,” she says, and the work demands precision because the system will eventually demand it back.
At the same time, she was building health and wellness businesses, including multiple brick-and-mortar fitness studios. That environment rewarded a different instinct. “You don’t have time for the 90 to 95% solution because everything else around you is moving too quickly,” she says. “Getting to that even 60, 70% solution was okay for today. And that gave me a starting point with which I could then go iterate.”
That tension became a leadership asset. It taught McCue to treat perfection as a tool, not a default setting, and to apply systems thinking not only to hardware and software, but to teams, incentives, and decision cycles.
Defining “good enough” without lowering the bar
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” becomes less a cliché than an operational necessity, especially when speed is demanded without clarity on what actually matters. McCue sees the struggle as a clarity problem, especially in hardware-software environments shaped by certification and regulatory expectations.
When the mandate is simply “be the best,” teams tend to chase the 95% solution everywhere, even when the near-term goal only requires a smaller slice of certainty.
The leader’s role is to translate ambition into increments. “You need to make sure that your team is really focused on what is the overall objective and what’s the true near-term objective,” she says.
That translation is a cultural stabilizer. McCue has watched morale fracture when teams sprint through a high-pressure milestone, celebrate, and then realize the roadmap is just a string of equally punishing sprints. “They realize there’s 10 more of those before they’re going to actually get to that next level,” she says. The remedy is visibility, with a credible sequence of milestones that explains how the short game advances the long game, whether the horizon is one week or five years.
Ownership and decision velocity as engineering disciplines
As programs grow in complexity and pressure mounts to deliver faster, execution failures are often blamed on people rather than systems. In McCue’s view, successful execution is designed through structure.
First comes ownership. “Each member of your team needs to understand exactly what they own,” she says. Clear boundaries create accountability, but she is equally intent on preventing information silos. The goal is to “cross pollinate” expertise across technical areas while preserving who is responsible for what.
Second is decision-making. In complex technical work, disagreement is inevitable and often healthy, until it becomes churn. “What happens when person A and person B and person C all disagree on a path forward?” Without a tie-breaking mechanism, even minor decisions can consume days or weeks, eroding schedule and confidence. Her emphasis is on establishing a framework that identifies who decides, how tradeoffs are evaluated, and when it is time to commit and move.
Communication underpins both. McCue calls it “the foundation of the house,” and she means it literally: no process survives if information does not move up, down, and laterally. “If you cannot effectively communicate as a leader, there is no way to avoid chaos.”
Documentation that scales the work, not the workload
In complex engineering efforts, documentation can be either a force multiplier or a drag. McCue argues for an explicit standard of sufficiency, set early, so teams do not discover too late that they have nothing usable to hand to a customer or a new teammate.
“Figuring out what is good enough as a leader and writing it down so that the team knows the situation going in” is what allows speed today without pain in the future. The aim is not paperwork for its own sake, but “breadcrumbs” that preserve intent, decisions, and lessons learned, enabling the next spiral of development to start from a stronger baseline.
AI will accelerate the pieces, and raise the bar on proof
McCue expects AI to increase speed, particularly in tasks that are administrative or lower-level in the engineering lifecycle. But in aerospace and defense, speed gains will collide with the need to show how something was built, not just that it works.
Near term, she anticipates AI will support component-level design and analysis while humans remain the validating and integrating layer. “Everything’s going to have to be broken down into the components and elements that we want AI to go develop,” she says, followed by checks and balances before integration into higher-level subsystems.
The harder question is acceptance. “Regulatory agencies want to see the method, the process, the details along the way,” McCue shares. If AI makes that lineage less legible, execution will demand new forms of discipline in verification, traceability, and standards.
By holding both the engineer’s hunger for rigor and the entrepreneur’s bias for action, McCue builds teams that can move decisively while still earning trust from customers, regulators, and mission stakeholders.
“One of the best things that you can do for yourself is something entrepreneurial on the side,” she says, even if it is temporary. Put real constraints around it, pick a specific objective, and feel the weight of decisions without a safety net. That experience, she believes, changes how leaders prioritize, communicate, and execute back inside complex organizations.
Follow Samantha McCue on LinkedIn for more insights.
