When transitioning to Model-Based Design for embedded systems development, it is essential to consider an overall plan spanning people, development processes, and tools. A common sense approach when beginning any process improvement activity is to first identify the problem to be solved and then develop a plan to implement the solution. When transitioning to Model-Based Design, performing the transition in an iterative manner - do, learn, adjust, and repeat - has been shown to be most effective. The end goal is a development process where the model is the design, verification is done throughout the development process using simulation, and the implementation of the entire application onto target hardware is highly automated. Faced with design and organizational complexity, time, quality, and cost pressures, the transition is akin to changing a flat tire while moving down the highway. Choosing the right first steps are key to a successful transition. This paper presents a set of practical strategies for determining the first steps when deploying Model-Based Design and code generation in production development processes.