Quality during Design

In this solo episode of Quality during Design, Dianna looks at two reasons product development teams jump from a partial understanding of a problem to a committed solution: speed and certainty. 

Fast prototyping, generative AI, and 3D printing can make building feel harmless, but activity only creates value when it answers a specific question and informs a decision. 

Certainty can create the same design fog more slowly, when familiar customers, old requirements, or past successes are treated as current evidence without being checked. 

The practical question is not whether teams should act, but whether their action is connected to learning and whether they are prepared to change course.

YOUR CHALLENGE

Take one customer assumption your team is relying on and ask: “When was the last time we checked it against current behavior?” Then identify what evidence would cause you to stop, change course, or revisit the solution.

RESOURCES
Season 7 episode kickoff — Why Do We Jump? About the Moment Before We Commit - Deeney Enterprises
Related episode with Ashley Roach — When Building Gets Cheap, Decisions Matter More, with Ashley Roach - Deeney Enterprises
For more highlights, visit the blog post: deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/s7e3

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

Fast prototyping changes the constraint.

When software, AI tools, and other rapid-prototyping methods make it inexpensive to turn an idea into something testable, the challenge is no longer only Can we build it? The harder questions become:
What should we build?

• Who is it for?
• What evidence do we need?
• When should we stop tweaking and get it in front of people?
• Which decisions are reversible—and which ones will lock in future choices?

In this episode, Ashley Roach and I discuss how speed can help teams explore ideas, but can also create a new version of the build trap: continuing to improve the thing because building feels productive, before confirming that it is valuable to customers.

Ashley shares how he uses AI tools as thought partners, including an example where an AI system challenged him to stop adding functionality and gather more evidence first. We also discuss one-way and two-way doors, innovation inside larger organizations, cross-functional decision-making, and what changes when everyone in a company can become a builder.

Key Takeaways:

• When building becomes cheap and fast, deciding what to build becomes a more important skill.
• Rapid prototyping can create a build trap if teams keep tweaking instead of testing with real people.
• Two-way-door decisions can often be made quickly because they are reversible; one-way-door decisions require deeper deliberation.
• Engineers, product managers, designers, and other specialists may increasingly participate in work outside their traditional roles.
• A simple opportunity brief can help teams examine whether an idea is worth pursuing before investing further.

Your Challenge
Before you build or keep refining your next idea, write down:

1. Who is this for?
2. What evidence would show that it is valuable?
3. Is the next decision reversible?

If the decision is reversible, consider making it and learning from the result. If it is difficult to reverse, slow down long enough to understand what you are locking in.

For more highlights from this conversation, including the Opportunity Brief checklist and extra resources that Ashley recommends, visit the blog post: deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcasts/s7e2

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

When a project goes off track, we usually look back and say, “We didn’t define the problem, and we jumped.” That sounds like a process breakdown, as if one good checklist or gate approval would have prevented it.

But design fog runs deeper than missing process. It’s what’s happening in us.

Over the next few episodes on Quality During Design, we’re exploring a quieter question: When we jump to a solution, why?

Before we understand the problem, we start building. We skip questioning and investigating, jump the peak of the design diamond, and reach for a solution that feels like progress, but is really an emotional shield against the discomfort of not knowing. It’s the "Ta-Da Flop" waiting to happen.

In this Season 7 opener, Dianna Deeney introduces the roadmap for this season's arc:

• What the "Anti-Jump" looks like: Staying in the fog on purpose to uncover the design inputs that actually matter.
• Why the jump is so hard to resist: In the moment, jumping doesn't feel like failure—it feels like forward progress.

The Three Internal Engines:

• Speed: When additive manufacturing, digital twins, and AI make building cheap, jumping gets easier.
• Certainty: When we’re convinced we already know, we stop checking.
• The Deeper Engine: A more human driver running underneath both, saved for our season finale.

The Roadmap: How upcoming guests like Ashley Roach (on the "tweak loop" and one-way vs. two-way doors) connect directly into this framework.

Your Practice Question for the Week:
When you catch yourself jumping this week, don’t judge it. Just ask:
"Did I jump because it was easy to build, or because I was certain I already knew?"

Resources Mentioned:

• Featured Book: Pierce the Design Fog: Develop High-Quality Products Faster Through Team Innovation by Dianna Deeney. Learn more at piercethedesignfog.com.
• Double Diamond Diagram: Check out the accompanying graphic in the blog post at deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/s7e1.

Subscribe to Quality During Design so you don't miss an episode in this season's arc!

Other podcast episodes you may like:

• Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning, AI, and VR in Design Engineering
• Stop Being a Witness to Decisions That You Should be Helping to Shape
• Foundations-Exploring the Problem Space, A Key Principle for Robust Product Design and Project Success
• The Design Fog is Derailing Your Project

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

Why do well-designed initiatives keep coming apart when they reach reality? 

Mike Fedorov, who spent 26 years in supply chain and operations at Mars and Accenture and now co-leads Applied AI Labs, explains that the failure usually isn’t a bad call inside a single design. It’s the coordination layer: the seams between teams, systems, and the data that no one remembers how to work. 

He walks through a transformation that stalled for months, what AI can actually do to close the gap, and the habits separating the AI programs that work from the 95% that quietly fail.

 Highlights

• The coordination layer is where modern design fails, not inside the design. The handoffs, systems, and data in the spaces between teams accumulate more opportunities to break than the parts themselves.
• The data is always a little wrong. Design for that. Waiting for perfect data is waiting forever; build systems that detect, tolerate, or self-correct small errors instead.
• AI doesn’t make the call; it should make the call obvious. AI’s job is to watch the data, connect the dots, and put the two or three important things in front of a human who decides.
• Mike's three rules that work when implementing AI for the coordination layer.

Visit the podcast blog for a special infographic from Mike.

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

A cross-functional team can make what seems like a solid Friday decision, captured in minutes and agreed to in the room. Only then nothing moves on Monday. 

Drawing on Agnes Carroll’s observation that “no one is carrying it,” the episode argues this decision room carry problem isn’t solved by better documentation or tools like Jira and decision matrices, because an assigned decision is not an authored one. 

The gap is cognitive: the people who must execute weren’t reasoning, stress-testing, and co-authoring the trade-offs when the decision was made. 

Using design-for-manufacturing as an example, we explain how Pierce the Design Fog and its ADEPT framework (align, discover, examine, prioritize, teamwork) are designed to create real-time co-authorship so decisions carry into execution, especially in high-consequence product development.

Agnes Carroll, Decision Architect for Complexity, Loomworx Studio.
Article: "The Decision the Room Will Not Carry"  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decision-room-carry-agnes-carroll-2sasc/
Studio: https://loomworxstudio.com

Design & Quality Snapshot: Services - Deeney Enterprises

Blog post for this episode: https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/decision-room-carry-why-your-best-decisions-disappear-on-monday/

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

In this milestone episode, Dianna reflects on how the thinking evolved from quality methods to product development processes, to team dynamics, and ultimately to one central idea:

Quality during Design happens when teams align early and think together intentionally.

In this episode

•  The question that has guided all 200 episodes 
•  Why good engineering teams still build products that miss the mark 
•  The evolution from tools → process → people → systems 
•  The "Design Fog" and why the earliest product decisions matter most 
•  What a backyard orchard taught Dianna about product development 
•  How brainwriting led to the ADEPT Framework 
•  Why the future of quality starts before engineering design begins 

Featured ideas

•  Design Fog 
•  ADEPT Framework 
•  Concept Space Model 
•  Brainwriting 
•  Early concept development 
•  Cross-functional alignment 
•  Building the right product before building the product right 

Thank you

Whether this is your first episode or you've been listening since 2021, thank you for being part of the Quality During Design community. Your questions, conversations, and willingness to rethink product development have shaped this podcast as much as the ideas shared.

Here's to the next 200 episodes.

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

Why do product teams stay misaligned? Jenny Wanger explains the structural problems: efficiency-focused handoff workflows, unclear strategy, and people left cleaning up decisions they didn't help make. She shares tested practices for influencing upstream decisions without formal authority: clarifying strategy through curiosity, bringing the right people in early (pre-mortems work), and publicly recognizing collaborators.

Key Takeaways

• Fire drills and half-finished features often stem from lost customer context in handoff-driven workflows
• Use curiosity, not criticism, to surface strategy gaps - Interview leaders and highlight missing pieces
• Run cross-functional pre-mortems early; rank risks by likelihood × impact, not opinion
• Make others look good publicly (CC their boss); build a reputation as someone worth inviting

Timestamps

• 02:42 The Misalignment Before Picture
• 05:05 The Handoff Trap
• 17:00 Strategy Gaps & Curiosity
• 23:00 Pre-Mortems & Early Involvement
• 32:00 First Steps

Resources

• Jenny Wanger: jennywanger.com | LinkedIn

Your Challenge
Pick one: Share a kudos with someone's manager, approach a colleague about a past bottleneck, or volunteer to run a pre-mortem.

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

The episode features Chad Schneider, CEO and founder of Root3 Labs, discussing prototyping as a discipline focused on answering specific questions to reduce technical, schedule, and market risk. 

He explains that prototypes need not resemble the final product, citing examples like using a cardboard mockup to verify hand access for connectors and 3D-printed sizing models to understand surgical constraints. 

Chad describes managing complex, time-constrained projects by rigorously evaluating requirements as needs versus wants. He uses quick calculations and low-fidelity prototypes to resolve unknowns early — when changes are cheap — rather than waiting for expensive tooling decisions to reveal them. 

He also shares a hospital device concept that was canceled after observing nurses (who immediately removed the cable-concealing covers the team had designed) framing 'killing' the project as a win.  

Key takeaway: before you build, write down the question you're trying to answer, then find the lowest-resolution way to answer it. For more highlights, visit the blog post.

00:00 Start With The Question
01:22 Meet Chad Schneider
02:25 What Root Three Builds
04:46 Prototype Means Question
06:25 Why Skipping Costs More
07:17 Cardboard Box Prototype
09:27 Managing Deadlines And Needs
13:47 Risk Based Prototyping Culture
21:48 User Feedback Can Kill Projects
30:47 Final Takeaways And Challenge

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

Engineering rework often comes from unasked questions or using the wrong tool at the wrong fidelity. 

Dianna outlines three common prototyping traps: 

1. the “ta-da” trap, where teams build polished prototypes to impress stakeholders before the concept is stable, anchoring the team to an early solution
2. the “I’m smarter than cardboard” trap, where engineers skip low-fidelity physical models in favor of analysis even when the real question is usability
3. the “validation theater” trap, where teams default to expensive, validation-level rigs before confirming they’re asking the highest-risk, right question. 

All three share a root cause: jumping from idea to build without defining what must be learned and the appropriate fidelity. 

She invites listeners to subscribe for a future episode on prototyping done well.

02:08 Trap 1: The 'ta-da' trap

04:19 Trap 2: The "I'm smarter than cardboard" trap

05:43 Trap 3: The "validation theater" trap

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.

Most of the social conversation around AI is aimed at business owners and programmers, but if you’re an engineer or quality professional, you might be wondering how to actually use these tools to help with your own work processes or information pools. While many people are waiting for their company to provide an AI strategy, there is a way to start building your own private "AI intern" today without being a coder or a programmer.

In this episode, I’m joined by technologist Vincent Deeney to discuss the practical side of running Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on your own hardware. We move past the hype to talk about how "playing" with these models is actually a high-level form of learning that can help you bridge technical gaps and soar in your productivity.

Vincent introduces a mental model for your personal development: the "Senior Engineer vs. Intern" workflow. You’ll learn how to use elite frontier models to help you architect complex concepts, then hand that plan over to a local model to execute the repetitive, data-heavy tasks. 

Whether you want to automate your morning research or just understand the "why" behind AI behavior, this episode is your guide to becoming a more capable, AI-literate professional. We don't just talk about AI - we give you a roadmap to start executing on your own.

Listen in and visit the podcast blog for extra resources: https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/s3e20

Send us a message

Work with Dianna I help product development teams build quality into the front end when it's cheap and easy, not late when it's expensive and painful. 

Book a 20-minute discovery call with Dianna's calendar. Whether you're navigating the "fuzzy front end" of product development and want to explore a workshop or advisory partnership, or you'd like to be a guest on this podcast. You'll leave with a summary, relevant resources, and a clear path for next steps within 24 hours. 

Pierce the Design Fog (piercethedesignfog.com): my book on aligning cross-functional teams, defining clear design inputs, and accelerating product success. NIEA Finalist Award, reviewed by PDMA. "Great for fans of Tony Fadell’s Build, David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall’s The Product Mindset."-BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)

Connect with me: I'm most active on LinkedIn. 

Free Resources for Subscribers Subscribe to the Quality during Design digest — https://newsletter.deeneyenterprises.com — for monthly actionable highlights, plus access to the Strategic Quality Integration Checklist (a free self-assessment download) and my Swipe File Vault.