Achieving Operational Excellence: Lessons Learned
Nemertes Live March 18, 5 PM ET
You’ve just taken over a product team. You’ve discovered it habitually misses deadlines and delivers buggy products to customers—over and over again. What do you do?
John Miranda faced this exact challenge. After assuming leadership of a product team that delivered almost as many bugs as working features, he turned it around to the point where it achieved 140 days of 100% defect-free product delivery.
How did he do it? You’ll learn in this interactive session, which reviews the step-by-step processes he implemented. The approach incorporates a focused application of after-action reviews (AARs) and application of the Theory of Constraints (from the book “The Goal”) at Ford Motor Company’s electronic division plant. It also includes lessons learned from the extreme challenges of yield improvement in leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing, and Lean manufacturing methods adapted to the world of software product development.
The approach is broadly applicable to many scenarios and processes seeking to improve customer value, elevate velocity of knowledge acquisition, and infuse a culture of continuous improvement. In short, anyone looking to achieve operational excellence.
The session closes with a discussion on how AI will reshape risks and outcomes on operational excellence: Which lessons are obsolete, and which must be (re)learned all over again in the age of AI?
This Nemertes Live interactive session is on Wednesday, March 18 at 5 PM Eastern.
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About John Miranda
John is joining Cal Poly’s Orfalea Graduate Business School in April 2026 as an adjunct lecturer following retirement from Intel Corporation, where he was a Sr. Director in the Corporate Strategy Office. John led CEO level discussions that seeded the formation of the Intel + AMD x86 ecosystem advisory group and the creation of Intel’s custom data center product group which is now supporting Nvidia custom solutions. John co-chaired the 2021 launch of Open Compute Project’s Sustainability Project in collaboration with industry leaders to define standards focused on energy efficiency and modular server design standards. Earlier John ran a software development team that developed internal applications such as automating fab tool configuration for new products across Intel fabs and modeling global manufacturing requirements to support annual CapEx decisions. Prior, John worked at Ford Motor Company championing Theory of Constraints to improve operational efficiency. John has an MBA from University of Texas and a BS in Computer Science from University of Michigan.