How do we stop being overwhelmed by the whole device?

You can follow a design. Put a part in front of you, and your hands know what to do. But say the words "safe and effective medical device," and something in you locks up. That is not a skill problem. That is a scope problem. Your team feels it too, even if no one says it out loud. Everyone is quietly holding the whole system in their head — the parts, the risks, the regulators, the patient on the other end. That weight does not divide by the number of people in the room. It multiplies, because each of you carries the whole thing alone, in silence. Here is what is true: the device is not one task. It is thousands of small, checkable choices, made by people who can only do one thing at a time. Your job today is not to make the device safe. Your job is to choose the next piece, show it to someone else, and let them check it. If the weight ever becomes more than tiredness — if it sits on your chest, if you cannot sleep for the dread of it — that is a signal to talk to someone outside this work, not just reorganize your tasks.