The engineering summit wasn’t built to inspire anyone. We put it together because we kept watching the same dysfunction play out across millwork companies, and nobody was naming it.

Engineers explain why something can’t be done. Leaders push harder for speed. Nothing changes.

So we built a space where engineers and business owners could sit through the same conversations, ask the same questions, and start to see where the real breakdowns were happening.

The Problem Nobody Wants to Name

Engineering is the function every millwork company depends on, and the one most leaders don’t really understand.

Most owners came up through sales, ops, installation, or PM. Engineering ends up as a black box in the middle of the company. Work goes in. Drawings come out. When it’s slow, the default assumption is the engineers need to move faster.

That’s where it breaks.

We see the same pattern across the industry: leaders push for speed, engineers push back with constraints, and the conversation dies there. Engineers are wired to identify problems. That’s their job. But most haven’t been trained to think past the constraints they’re handed. That gap is real, and it’s costing companies money.

What We Were Actually Trying to Create

The goal wasn’t to get engineers in a room with each other. It was alignment between engineers and the leaders running the businesses they work in.

We built the agenda around the full engineering lifecycle: training and onboarding, drafting standards, review processes, engineering for site conditions, and how to structure the department itself.

And we kept engineers and business leaders in the same room the whole time. That part mattered. Live Q&A meant questions came straight from the audience, no filter. That’s where the conversation got honest.

The PM and Engineer Tension Nobody Fixes

One topic kept surfacing: the relationship between engineers and project managers.

If you’ve been in this industry more than five years, you’ve seen it. Engineers frustrated with PMs. PMs frustrated with engineers. Most companies just absorb the tension instead of dealing with it.

We put it on the table.

The point cuts both ways. If engineers want to be understood, they have to understand the pressure PMs are operating under. Most of the friction in engineering isn’t technical. It’s communication and misalignment, and it shows up the same way in almost every shop.

The Shift That Matters

One of the most useful conversations was about how engineers actually spend their day.

Engineers are the bottleneck in a lot of companies. They’re also doing work that doesn’t require an engineer. Printing paperwork. Managing communication. Chasing down information from PMs, vendors, and field crews.

If engineering is your constraint, why are you loading it with tasks that don’t require engineering?

That question shifted the room. Owners stopped asking “how do we get engineers to go faster?” and started asking “what should engineers not be doing at all?”

That’s the right question.

How We Actually Measure Success

The summit hit record attendance. Feedback was strong. AWI wants to run it again next year. Good signs, but that’s not the scorecard.

The real test is what changes after the event. Are companies protecting engineering time? Are they pulling low-value tasks off their engineers’ plates? Are they rethinking how work flows through the organization?

If none of that happens, the summit was just a nice day in a hotel.

Where This Goes Next

The first summit was intentionally broad. We needed alignment before we could go deeper.

Next year, we want engineers walking out with processes they can implement on Monday morning, and leaders walking out with a clearer picture of how to restructure work around engineering capacity.

The next layer of bottlenecks isn’t about drawing faster. It’s about choosing the right work, sequencing projects correctly, aligning engineering with business goals, and making better decisions under pressure. That’s where most companies are stuck right now.

The Real Opportunity

The summit opened the door. Engineers and leaders heard the same conversations. Assumptions got challenged.

But the door isn’t the result.

Engineering isn’t the problem in your company. How your company thinks about engineering probably is. Fix that, and a lot of other things start to loosen up.

Jacob Edmond

CEO