About Peter Sun

About Peter Sun

There wasn’t one moment that pulled me into engineering. As a kid I was always building or fixing something, whether that meant grabbing my dad’s toolbox to put furniture together or debugging the family computer. I loved solving the puzzle other people got stuck on.

When it came time to apply to colleges, I was encouraged to look at pharmacy and pre-med, but nothing stood out like engineering. I also knew it could be a lucrative path. I never hesitated.

I studied mechanical engineering at Boston University and mechanics of solids at Brown, then designed orthopedic implants and instruments and ran FEA at Hospital for Special Surgery. Design work gave me my foundation: turning user needs into design inputs, then proving the design through verification and validation, one phase gate at a time.

After several product launches, I learned that technical quality alone doesn’t decide whether a product succeeds. I once pitched a patella resurfacing implant to a panel of knee-replacement surgeons. It was designed to cut SKUs and simplify inventory. The problem was too small to justify the investment; there was no business case. That’s when I knew I had to learn the other questions a product has to answer. I moved from Senior Engineer to Project Manager and earned my PMP along the way, partly to learn and partly to show I was serious about this path. Later, at BrioHealth Solutions, I helped establish a PMO and led a Class III LVAD program. Today I lead large cross-functional medical-device programs.

The hardest lesson

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I knew the line credited to Peter Drucker, but I learned it at a startup. Early on, we had a small team of A players who ignored job descriptions and jumped in on whatever problem was in front of us. The company’s survival depended on the product. We worked hard, got some luck, and moved faster than any team I’ve seen since. After launch, we needed a different mix of people to succeed in the clinical field, so we grew quickly and brought in the structure of a larger medical-device company. The startup culture faded, and a different culture took its place, more organized and built for a different stage. I still haven’t seen anything match the speed of that small team. That’s why I put culture ahead of strategy.

Why I write

I’ve spent more than a decade across mechanical design, GD&T, FEA, software, AI and program management. I write for anyone who can learn from that: engineers weighing a move into project management, program managers who want a technical view, and specialists at any stage who are curious how others built their careers and picked up new skills.

Credentials: MS, PE, PMP, ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt, CQE, CRE.

Outside work

I build side projects, mostly Chrome extensions and small software tools made with AI (EchoFill is one). I follow people taking on creative projects of their own, and I read a lot of news, from CNBC to YouTube, to keep a pulse on what’s happening. Much of it finds its way into what I write here.