During product development, we're consistently looking for ways to learn more about the product in order to make design decisions. Some of that comes from test.

What do we do when our test results are...surprising?

We talk about some next steps I typically take when tasked with surprises: revisiting the purpose, understanding failure modes at test vs. what we expected (requirements and FMEA), finding a root cause (with the help of FMEA), and deciding what to do next.

Visit the podcast blog.

Other Quality during Design podcast episodes you might like:

How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

Remaking Risk-Based Decisions: Allowing Ourselves to Change our Minds.

5 Aspects of Good Reliability Goals and Requirements

The Way We Test Matters

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

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We have a reliability target for our system. But we're not meeting it.

To avoid this scenario, what is something we can do in early development?  

When we're figuring out our concept, we can better learn about our options. We can work with Reliability Engineers to understand what we know, the risk in what we don't know, and to prioritize reliability of the modules to be able to meet the reliability of our whole system.

We talk about using reliability allocation to help us choose reliability goals for modules of our product design. 

There is much more on the podcast blog: graphics, lists, and extra links.  Be sure to visit it at the website!

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

New product development projects are really exciting at the start. Even though we know very little about what the final product is going to look like, we can still use a quick graphical tool to help us direct our engineering attention.

We talk about ways to use a very simple System Architecture Diagram to help us investigate what is new, different, or has been a problem in the past. We also discuss ways we can continue to iterate on it throughout development to help us communicate and make decisions.

Visit the podcast blog, here.

Other Quality during Design podcast episodes you might like:

5 Options to Manage Risks during Product Engineering

What do we do with FMEA early in design concept?

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

We can find Quality at the back-end of product creation, where it's used for compliance.  We want to pick up some of it and move it to the front-end, where design decisions are happening. It's there that we can yield it like a tool to work with our cross-functional team, to help us with doing the engineering work that's important for great designs.

We explore why Quality can help us PRUNE the development process just by the nature of how it's used.
And we highlight the 3 areas that we focus on in Quality during Design: risk-based decisions, quality and reliability engineering partnership, and the user's process.

Visit the podcast blog for a transcript and more links.

Other Quality during Design podcast episodes you might like:

Quality as a Strategic Asset vs. Quality as a Control

 More about the PRUNE strategy:

Quality during Design Framework: PRUNE - Quality During Design

 The driving forces behind Quality during Design:

First time here? - Quality During Design

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

Where do we sometimes need to look for inspiration?  Books!

We talk about 11 books in 5 different topics that are useful for different perspectives on engineering and design topics.

And I tell you what I'm most looking forward to reading next.

What book recommendations do you have for me?

Find a link to the book list on the podcast blog. 

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

What is engineering in the color economy?

We explore facets of sustainable economic models: Green, Blue, Yellow, and Orange.

Where do you fit in now? Where would you like to be? And how can you make design choices within each (or all!) of these color economies?

There's more on the blog for this podcast.

Want to download the 12 things checklist? Visit this link.

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

What makes a great design?

It depends.

We talk about the spectrum of designs (from great to spam), the various customers engineers need to design for, and how engineers can work with their team toward defining what a great design should be.

You're invited to download a checklist: 12 things you should have before a design concept makes it to the engineering drawing board. Download Here

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

We worked on a project with our team and met our goal!
Except, management isn't happy - they expected something else.

Seeing if we have alignment on goals is easy if we gather the team and stakeholders for 10 minutes and use a continuum.

There are certain categories that goals will fall within. A continuum is a way we can list those categories, get alignment, and gain an understanding of how 'big' of a project this is going to be. We get clarity on our goals.

Is it hard? Not at all. Is it eye-opening? Sometimes. It can help us move forward with a discussion to help ensure we're all successful.

Visit the podcast blog for an example.


I mentioned this previous QDD episode:
Do you have SMART ACORN objectives? - Quality During Design

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

Relationships matter! And they can be difficult to understand.

We're taking relationships between variables. Does one variable affect another? Or do they just correlate? Understanding which matters to the values of our decisions.

We talk about the saying "Correlation does not imply causation", how to find a confounding variable, and ways to check that we've got the triggering cause that's going to affect our outcome.

When we're under pressure to figure something out, it's helpful to stop and remember some fundamentals.

Visit the podcast blog for extra links. 

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.

Meetings to ADD productivity to our day? Yes!

We need our time to be productive, individually.
We also need input from our team. We can use meetings to add productivity to our day, if done right.

We break it down: hours in a day, limits of humans, and the minimum requirements of a good meeting.

Visit the podcast blog for extra information about Lean Coffee(tm). 

Other Quality during Design podcast episodes you might like:

Product Design from a Data Professional Viewpoint, with Gabor Szabo (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

Product Design from a Marketing Viewpoint, with Laura Krick (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

Quality as a Strategic Asset vs. Quality as a Control

Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.

Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma

JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.