I and my assistant have spent the last month devising experiments that are meant to chart out the stability or robustness of a small set of compounds whose manufacture has been problematic. This has been a kind of a process development activity wherein we are trying to understand what the specific sensitivities of this molecule are and how they might impact process stability.
My job these days is reactive hazards analysis and process safety. We have been trying to dream up experiments that tease out particular weaknesses a compound may have in normal or plausible off-normal conditions. While the compounds in question do not have apparent issues with reactive hazards, the skill set needed to find reactive hazards is useful in finding economic hazards as well.
An economic hazard would be something that threatens the profitability of a process. A production instability is simply a low threshold for a transition to off-normal processing conditions. Sometimes a process instability is physically dangerous and sometimes it is only an economic threat.
I have to say that this has been very enlightening so far.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Hopefully you are “prepared”.
A colleague was doing similar work, seeing how disasterous various mistakes would be to a process. The most exteme example he proposed was the operators completely forgetting to add the solvent. They ran a few (very) small scale reactions and were shocked to find that the product was actually very useful, doubly so since it could be prepared without the use of solvents. Accolades and promotions soon followed. (Hey, it was in better economic times. Nowadays, he would be allowed to keep his job for 2 more weeks.)
Luck favors the prepared.
So true.
Do you manufacture explosives? Or are the intermediates dual use?
Quite frankly I wouldn’t want your job if you do.
We don’t manufacture explosives on purpose.
So you do it for fun?
It is of interest to know if a compound is capable of a self-accelerating decomposition. Some compounds can internally rearrange to release heat of formation as well as gaseous products. If one mole of compound thermally decomposes to give several moles of gaseous decomp products, then there is the potential for an overpressure of the reactor. A simplistic example- one mole of liquid water occupies 0.018 liters at room temperature and 1 atm. Convert it to a gas at room temperature and 1 atm and it will occupy 22.4 liters. As the water expands it can do work on its surroundings (PV work). The trick is to make sure the work is constructive.