We're heading into pilot production, where some initial parts might be made.

We've got to finish those design specs and engineering drawings!

• Manufacturing wants to start cutting steel for molds. 
• Suppliers want to work out the specs on their end. 
• QA is asking what they should inspect. 

Before you pass it along, have you identified what features are critical? Does it align with managing risk? And are you communicating that effectively on your specs and drawings?

Creating design specs is an important part of engineering design. We review a way to choose critical design features, based on risk.

Check out these other podcast episodes to further explore some of these topics:

• The Way We Test Matters
• Designing Specs for QA

Visit the podcast blog for links to related episodes.

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 get stuck when trying to discover a solution to a problem.

We talk about a Nine Windows tool and TRIZ - more thought-provoking methods that we can use to get unstuck and move on to the next step.

Visit the podcast blog for graphics and lots of helpful 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.

We can get stuck when trying to discover a solution to a problem. Sometimes it helps to expand our thinking into other avenues. We can reframe our problem within its contradictions. What is it not?

We review an Is/Is-Not Matrix: how it's built, its purpose, and how it can help us.

Visit the podcast blog for the matrix. 

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're uncovering risks during our new product development, about our design. How do we manage risks? What options do we have?

There are at least 5 options we can take to manage risks. We talk about each, and how quality and reliability methods and techniques may help us with the next steps to be able to make decisions with our team.

Visit the podcast blog for links to episodes that explore concepts a little deeper.

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.

As a design engineer, you’re tasked with translating vague customer statements into something technical and measurable. And you also need to identify what requirements are important: filtering the “must meet” requirements against the “should have” requirements. And, finally, you need to do this with your cross-functional team.  

What if you miss something important? 

It’s difficult. There is a method that we can use. Let’s talk about the House of Quality and how you can use it no matter if your company uses QFD or not.

See the podcast blog for a graphic and other references.

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.

If you have quality friends, you may have heard of Gemba. What is Gemba and can it help with product design? 

Gemba is an ideology. 

And, yes, it can help with product design!

We explore how and talk about why you might want to adopt the term "Gemba" for Product Design Engineering.

Visit the podcast blog for links and other QDD episodes that explore these ideas more.

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.

"A Chat with Cross Functional Experts" is a Quality during Design interview series. Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they're involved and work with product design engineering teammates. 

Today we talk with Gabor Szabo. Gabor is an engineering and data professional with experience in numerous industries, including the medical device and automotive industries. In his current role a Sr. Principal Engineer of Operations Excellence, he works with various cross-functional teams on validating new processes and products, launching new products, helps them diagnose and solve technical problems. He hosts the Critical Talks podcast. He also develops software and builds data products in R.

We talk about: 

• managing ongoing team information
• new product development as a "discovery mission"
• confirming that it is good to have problems
• how aligning the head and the heart can lead to success 
• his ventures into the R programming language with his motivation to serve the engineering and quality communities 

Visit the podcast blog for links to Jocko and Gabor's book recommendation.

Register for a live webinar on June 8, 2022 about Design Reviews! Click here to learn more.

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.

Reliability Engineering isn't just about assessments. It's about providing information to make decisions. How does reliability engineering affect design? 

We answer all the questions from the classical Kipling Method:

• What kind of design inputs can we expect from a Reliability Engineering working relationship?
• Why is their point of view important?
• When should we get them involved in the product development cycle? 
• Who can we generally look to for a reliability engineering viewpoint? 
• How can we get them involved? 
• Where do we find out more information? 

Related QDD episodes:
5 Aspects of Good Reliability Goals and Requirements - Quality During Design

Visit the podcast blog of this episode.

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.

FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) is a tool we can use to help us investigate complaints from the field. The FMEA is the collective team knowledge about the risks of this product, so it’s a valuable source in our investigation about what’s going on in the field.

We talk through how to go about using FMEA for complaint investigation and what we can do with the information.

Visit the QDD Blog for additional links. 

Other, related QDD posts that you may be interested in:

Getting Started with FMEA: It All Begins with a Plan

Choosing a Confidence Level for Test using FMEA

How many controls do we need to reduce risk?

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

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.

Many presentation books and guides seem to focus on presentations that we see at conferences, for sales pitches, or for executive meetings about business topics.

They don't seem applicable to the technical design reviews that engineers host.

But they do relate.

We talk about just 3 ways that we can change how we can plan technical design reviews, using some of the principles of presentations.

Visit the podcast blog for extra links and resources.

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.