Hi , I'm Dianna Dini . We are talking about product design and new product development and working early with our cross-functional teams to be able to get the design inputs that we need when we're actually designing things and making decisions . Now we have so many inputs and I'm asking you to expand that a little bit and get a little more inputs .
Well , which ones are important ? Is it the most technical input ? Is it the features that our competitors have that we don't yet ? How do we prioritize all these different kind of inputs ? Let's talk more about that after the brief introduction . Hello and welcome to Quality During Design , the place to use quality thinking to create products others love for less .
Each week , we talk about ways to use quality during design and product development . I'm your host , dianna Dini . I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design . I consult with businesses and coach individuals on how to apply quality during design to their processes .
Listen in and then join us Visit qualityduringdesigncom . At Quality During Design , we talk about early concept development and using quality tools in order to explore the concept space with our cross-functional team to be able to get those design inputs .
Using quality tools is a way to self-advocate and enable ourselves , the product design engineers , to be able to get those inputs at the time that we need it , the time that we're making decisions about the product design , along with being able to have a framework to work against when we don't even have a product design yet , which is something that quality tools do
. And they're also visual , so it is easier to facilitate a discussion with a group and focus on a particular area of our concept space when we're using quality tools . The other benefit of using quality tools in this space is that they have a built-in way to help you prioritize those different inputs that you're gathering .
Now , why would we want to prioritize ideas in concept development ? Well , we want to be able to prioritize design inputs to make trade-off decisions . We can have this or we can have that . We can't have both , so which one is more important ? Being able to prioritize can help bring clarity to that kind of decision . It will also help us focus our efforts .
We only have so much limited time , effort and resources to be able to accomplish tasks . Maybe we don't have enough of those kind of resources to be able to develop all the things . So having a priority of design inputs that we want to focus on helps us focus our efforts . It also helps ensure that whatever we're designing delivers what's important .
We may have a lot of customer inputs . Prioritizing will help us understand which of those is most important for our customer . These kind of priorities also helps us set up reliability goals , because we'll understand the use environment , the use space , we'll understand what the expectations are and we can set up reliability goals appropriately based on the priority .
And understanding the priority of things also helps us communicate with the manufacturing , production or the suppliers . It can help us choose the manufacturing method or the production method that will help us meet the requirements . We can prioritize these things really early in concept development , when we're still exploring the problem space for design inputs .
When we're looking at customer experiences in the concept space . When we're looking at benefits potential benefits that this new product could give to our customers , we can prioritize those benefits based off of a customer satisfaction rating .
When things don't go right , when we have a potential problem our customers might be experiencing a potential symptom based off that problem , we can start to prioritize those kind of design inputs based on risk , the severity of the impact to our customer and the likelihood that it could occur .
And when we're examining the use process in the concept space , which is the task that our user is trying to take to get from point A to point B all the different steps and interactions they potentially have with their product we can prioritize those process steps in other ways . What is critical to quality ? What is value added ? Who is doing what when ?
And can we make that easier ? Are there mistake-proofing things that we could do ? I'm promoting making priority decisions early , but what if we make a mistake in setting a priority early in concept development ? What if we uncover something new ? Well then , we need to reprioritize . Product development processes aren't a static thing .
We do want consistency throughout the product development process . That makes things easier , but we also need to allow ourselves room to change our minds or reprioritize once we learn something new . As an example , we do a product test and we get a phone call from the lab to investigate a failure which was really unexpected . We didn't expect this kind of failure .
It's something new . We haven't seen it before . So what do we do in that case ? We don't want to ignore it . We need to do something about it , understanding what action we want to take or what we want to do . It really depends , doesn't it ? Going back to the priorities that we've set , it helps .
Why was it given the priority that it had , and now that we've learned something new , does that change its meaning ? If we get to a point where we're comparing ideas against each other , there are other methods of prioritizing and I covered those in a previous episode called After the Storm Compare and Prioritize Ideas .
In that episode I talked about Paired Comparison Prioritization Matrices and DMRCS , another systematic way that we can evaluate options . What's today's insight to action ? We can start prioritizing design inputs and ideas at concept development and then we iterate and adjust as we learn more about our product through the product development process .
At least setting a starting point at concept will help us do all those things that prioritizing helps with to help us make trade-off decisions and focus our efforts and deliver what's important .
Using quality tools to help explore concept development not only helps us work with our cross-functional team on ideas , they also help us prioritize those ideas so that we can work appropriately . I did mention a previous podcast episode that related , called After the Storm , and I will link to that in the podcast blog for this episode .
This has been a production of Dini Enterprises . Thanks for listening .