Hugh McManus is a Senior Special Projects Engineer at Metis Design, applying modern product development, business and technical practices to the aerospace industry. He has done pioneering work in application of lean techniques to product development with MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI), including leading seminars and workshops, supervising research, and authoring several tools for lean transformation. He is currently facilitating lean short courses and transformation events using a unique business simulation (co-developed with Eric Rebentisch of LAI) to rapidly teach advanced lean concepts, and allow participants to experience lean transformations in a simulated environment. He is also developing, and working with, advanced tools for space system architecture and front-end design. These focus on trade space exploration, the art of looking at a very large number of possible design solutions, and making rational comparisons between them, before making difficult and potentially expensive development decisions. Methods for handling and even exploiting the risk and uncertainty that are intrinsic to the early stages of product development are also under study as part of this effort.