"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 speak with Laura Krick, a VP for a global medical device manufacturer. She's involved in marketing, sales, and commercial operations for new product development.

We talk about these topics: 

• Her background and what led her to her current role.
• Her roles in new product development, including her hands-on commercial operations perspective.
• Developing the user experience through data, iteration, and relationships with early adopters.
• Reasons and methods for product design engineers to get into the field.
• Ways for product design engineers to utilize the knowledge base of sales, marketing, and commercial operations reps in their cross-functional team.
• Sharing fun a risk management activity (!)
• Her recommended books and authors for engineers.

Listen to A Chat with Laura. Gain a different perspective and get actionable advice.

Visit the blog for a list of Laura's book recommendations.

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 super-tool for a team, especially when developing concepts and requirements. Done early, iteratively, and treated as a "living" analysis helps teams throughout development and beyond.

Some people seem to either love it or hate it. I don't have a strong reaction like that, but I do think it can be a valuable option for teamwork and design - so much so that I've dedicated a few episodes to it (including this one). We touch on some of the objections to it, too.

FMEAs can have different focuses and can be built to suit the goals of the team. There are two FMEAs, in particular, that can be done in the early concept stages of development: “use” UFMEA and “systems design” DFMEA.

• What is the difference between these two FMEAs?
• How do they relate to one another?
• Should we do both of them?
• What do we do with the information?

Visit the blog post for a VENN Diagram and additional info.

Visit these other blogs to explore these topics further:

Getting Started with FMEA: It All Begins with a Plan

Choosing a Confidence Level for Test using FMEA

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

Prevention Controls vs. Detection Controls

The Designer's Risk Analysis affects Business, Projects, and Suppliers

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.

When defining design inputs and specifications, what does a design engineer need to consider about the test and measure capability? What are the typical ways that we assess the variability that a test or measurement introduces into our result?

Visit the website for additional links and a Venn diagram. https://www.qualityduringdesign.com/qdd/design-input--specs-vs-test--measure-capability

Watch this episode on YouTube. 

Explore More. Get a deeper dive of these topics through these other QDD episodes:

The Way We Test Matters

Statistical vs. Practical Significance

What is ‘Production Equivalent’ and Why Does it Matter?

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 engineers may suggest environmental stress tests. There are many types of tests in an RE's toolbox. We compare two types of commonly known tests that are used for design: ALT vs. HALT. What are the important distinctions between these two methods? What value do they each bring to design engineering? And how do they fit into other reliability test methods?

Visit the website for additional links, downloads, and a venn diagram. Plus, I link to another fun video.  https://www.qualityduringdesign.com/qdd/ALT-vs-HALT/

View the video on YouTube

Further explore these topics from these other QDD episodes:

HALT! Watch out for that weakest link.

Results-Driven Decisions, Faster: Accelerated Stress Testing as a Reliability Life Test

Environmental Stress Testing for Robust Designs

Getting Comfortable with using Reliability Results

5 Aspects of Good Reliability Goals and Requirements

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.

Viewing Quality as a strategic asset to new product development can help us create those products that others love, for less. We talk about some challenges with new product development, the ideal state, and how we can use quality to get there. Use quality engineering and reliability engineering to P.R.U.N.E. the development process so we can develop the best products that we can.

Visit the blog for more information and citations. 

Need more help getting started? Try these episodes.

Using SIPOC to Get Started

Types of Design Analyses possible with User Process Flowcharts

Getting Started with FMEA – It All Begins with a Plan

Choosing Quality Tools (Mind Map vs. Flowchart vs. Spaghetti Diagram)

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.

This fourth episode of the "QDD Versus" series focuses on concepts relating to Design for Manufacturability. Understand how design specs fit into process control, process capability, and SPC and where they typically don't fit at all.

We talk about things to think about when setting limits on design features.
And, when defining controls for potential failures, knowing how processes are controlled can help us decide if the controls we have are good enough or not.

Watch on YouTube.

Visit the blog for additional graphics. 

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 talk about customers of design information. It takes many people to realize a product design into something that can be sold and used. Those people need design information to ensure that they're performing their tasks to produce a high-quality product, and to be able to use our product appropriately. We review who our customers are and what type of information they need from design engineers. 

Visit the blog for additional graphics, transcripts, and videos.

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.

Once we've decided to control something (think of our prevention and detection controls), we then need to decide how to measure it. Different controls may need different measuring requirements, which can give us discrete or continuous data. We treat these data types differently when collecting it, determining sample sizes, and analyzing it for results. Tune-in to learn more about how to take the next step in defining controls: figuring out how to measure it and considering the data.

Another QDD episode you might like:
Designing Specs for QA

New! Watch the video on YouTube

Visit this episode at https://www.qualityduringdesign.com/qdd/discrete-data-vs-continuous-data/ for additional graphics, transcripts, and 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.

Not all controls are equal, and we don't have to wait for something bad to happen to start designing with them. We compare different types of controls in product development and design engineering: Prevention Controls vs. Detection Controls. We review concepts, uses for controls, risk-based controls, and how to prioritize design efforts for the right controls.

Visit the podcast blog for a Venn diagram and other links.

Get the poka-yoke mistake-proofing checklist here: Mistake-Proofing - The Poka-Yoke of Usability - Quality During Design

Another QDD podcast episode you might like: How many controls do we need to reduce risk?

NEW! Watch the video on YouTube.
Visit www.qualityduringdesign.com for more topics.

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.

Your team is faced with a complex decision. Maybe it's complex because you have a lot of options or maybe it's complex because it's technically challenging and requires some testing. You may want to consider a structured approach: DMRCS.

Define
Measure
Reduce
Combine
Select

Learn more about this approach by statisticians Dr. Anderson-Cook and Dr. Lu.
Check the podcast blog for their articles and examples.

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.