How Aaron Moncur promotes joy, productivity, and community in engineering

Most founders build products. Aaron Moncur built a culture — and then turned it into a company. Pipeline Design & Engineering started as a one-man shop in Arizona and grew into a team that ships complex machines without “managing” anyone. His bet? That joy is a harder, sharper engineering tool than process docs. 

Outside of running Pipeline Design & Engineering, Aaron also heads up a conference called the Product Development Expo (PDX) that’s all about skill building and knowledge sharing in the hardware community, hosts the Being An Engineer podcast where he recently interview Sam Holland, and is the organizer of Phoenix Hardware Meetup! It was a pleasure to sit down with Aaron to learn more about his approach to building and leading engineering teams.

Most engineering leaders talk about “process” and “efficiency.” You say “don’t manage your team.” What’s the most unorthodox thing you’ve done at Pipeline that would make a traditional engineering manager cringe?

Building and leading high-performing engineering teams isn’t about enforcing rules or extracting output. It’s about culture. At Pipeline Design & Engineering, our purpose isn’t simply to develop exceptional products (like our EZ Motion controller that helps test teams reduce validation time by 80%). Our deeper purpose — the one that guides every decision we make — is to promote joy in the lives of our team members.

“Promoting joy” isn’t a phrase you usually hear in hardware engineering. Can you share a specific moment when leading with joy directly saved a project — or turned a disaster into a win?

That might sound fluffy, especially in the context of hard engineering. But here’s what we’ve learned: When your team is energized, respected, and trusted, they do their best work. Not because they’re forced to, but because they want to. In fact, one of the most underutilized tools in engineering leadership is focusing on your people, not just your processes.

Who was the first customer or team member that validated what you were building? The one where you thought, “Okay, this might actually work.”

I took one of my engineers to lunch one day and we were just shooting the breeze — no particular topic or agenda. All of a sudden, he looks at me and says, “You know what? Pipeline is the only place I’ve ever worked where I feel totally comfortable saying what I actually think. At all my previous jobs, I had to maintain a shield and a filter to make sure I didn’t rustle any feathers, but it’s different here. I can speak my mind freely without risk of being judged or penalized somehow.” That was a telling moment for me, and a milestone where I realized this culture we’re building is really working. Since that experience, I’ve had many of our team members tell me in private effectively the same thing. 

With your array of offerings, you’re building a bigger ecosystem. What’s missing from the engineering community today that you’re trying to create?

I believe that engineering teams everywhere — not just ours — deserve support, inspiration, and practical tools to do better work. That’s why my business partner Brad Hirayama and I are so excited to continue developing the following:

• 🎙️ The Being An Engineer podcast – Interviews with high-performing engineers across industries.
• 🌊 The Wave – A growing platform for engineers to access tools, resources, and each other.
• 🔧 PDX: Product Development Expo – A two-day, in-person bootcamp-style training event for product development engineers.

If you’re an engineer, PDX is where you’ll find others like you — problem-solvers who build physical products and want to get better at it. It’s not a passive tradeshow. It’s hands-on training led by industry experts. Come learn advanced tools and techniques, meet new vendor partners, and solve real problems alongside your peers.

📍 Location: Phoenix, AZ
📅 Dates: October 21–22, 2025 (Exhibitor setup on October 20)
🔗 Website: https://pdexpo.engineer 

We hope to see you there! Readers of this post can get $50 off their ticket price by using the following code at checkout: WM9AC5. And if nothing else, we hope this post inspires you to lead your engineering team a little differently.

Three stories of success

We asked Aaron to share a few real stories that show how the mindset he describes translates into extraordinary productivity and real business wins. Here’s what he shared. 

Story 1: Managing by invitation, not compulsion

A customer of ours who manufactures a high-pressure cartridge used in law enforcement training gave us a shot at two major machine builds, each of which required extremely sophisticated (and fully automated) cycle testing of their cartridges, as well as data acquisition using a variety of sensors and vision systems. A great opportunity, but with a brutal caveat: Both machines needed to be built from scratch in just 10 weeks.

The only way to make this happen was to put in extra hours, nights, and weekends. But instead of issuing a mandate, we gathered the team and explained the situation transparently. We asked: “Are you willing to take this on?” And to their credit, the entire team said yes — enthusiastically.

The difference was that they enrolled themselves. There were eight team members we assigned to this schedule-aggressive project, and because the decision was theirs, not one of those team members needed supervision or motivational pep talks. No one had to be told to stay late or work on a Saturday. They just did it. The project was a success, not because we managed hard, but because giving the team the choice to enroll themselves served as far better motivation than an iron fist manager ever could.

Story 2: Our purpose isn’t a tagline—It’s a productivity tool

Walk into our office, and the first thing you’ll see is a mural of our core values. At the top is core value #1: “Treat our customers well, treat our team members better.”

A medical device customer of ours once read that and asked, “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” It was a fair question, and it opened up a powerful conversation. I asked him: “Would you rather have an engineer working on your project who feels uninspired and underappreciated? Or one who’s respected, energized, and excited to solve problems?” He got it immediately.

Story 3: Transparency in tough times

During a difficult period, we saw a slowdown that would soon require furloughs. I didn’t want our unaffected team members to carry unnecessary anxiety. So before we broke the news company-wide, I personally called each individual who wouldn’t be affected and told them directly.

That honesty meant a lot. After the announcement, several team members reached out and said they’d never worked anywhere so transparent. They were grateful.

I had worried that sharing the reality might scare people away. Instead, no one quit. The team stuck together. And when things recovered, we were stronger than ever.

Culture-driven productivity is a long game

The lesson here isn’t “treat your employees nicely and you’ll get what you want.” It’s deeper than that. It’s about trust, autonomy, and purpose. At Pipeline, we don’t treat culture like a sideshow. We see it as the core operating system of a successful engineering business.

And this mindset doesn’t just shape our internal team — it drives everything we do externally, too.

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