Send us a text We've been talking about how to best work with our cross-functional team at early concept development - to use quality and reliability tools in working meetings to really understand the concept space as a way to design for how the customer may experience our new concept idea. Coming out of our talks make be questions about unknowns or misalignments. We may need to meet our customers where they're at to get clarity. When engineers say, "I'd like to talk with a customer about this,"...
May 24, 2023•14 min•Ep. 96
Send us a text Dianna Deeney interviews Sol Rosenbaum about engineering with receptivity: how an openness toward others for new impressions and different ideas can lead to a successful engineering career. This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts". Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team within engineering projects. About Sol Sol Rosenbaum graduated with a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering and is currently the Owner...
May 17, 2023•32 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Send us a text A goal without a plan is just a wish. We take these wishes... "I wish I had the cross functional input that I need for design inputs." "I wish I could work with my cross functional team." "I wish my team would accept my design idea." ...and we add a plan to make them a GOAL. We plan for what it is we want and how we're going to get there using Quality during Design. Join the waitlist for the Quality during Design Journey for a special offer. DISCOVER YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FOCUS...
May 10, 2023•10 min•Ep. 95
Send us a text We're given information about an opportunity for a new product. We talk about what can happen when we start solution-building just with what we're given. And we talk about an alternative start to a new engineering project. DISCOVER YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FOCUS: UNLOCK YOUR IMPACT Take this quick quiz to cut through the 'design fog' and discover where your greatest potential lies BI-WEEKLY EPISODES Subscribe to this show on your favorite provider and Give us a Rating & Review...
May 03, 2023•8 min•Ep. 94
Send us a text In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we're pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis. In our Season 1 - Episode 93 titled "The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering", we talked about hypothesis testing: how it is used for lots of data analysis techniques. The next 4 episodes of this QDD Redux are taking the next steps. _________________________________________ When we’re looking at results (like measures of a charac...
Apr 26, 2023•7 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Send us a text In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we're pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis. In our Season 1 - Episode 93 titled "The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering", we talked about hypothesis testing: how it is used for lots of data analysis techniques. The next 4 episodes of this QDD Redux are taking the next steps. _________________________________________ When trying to fit a probability distribution to quantit...
Apr 19, 2023•10 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Send us a text In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we're pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis. In our Season 1 - Episode 93 titled "The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering", we talked about hypothesis testing: how it is used for lots of data analysis techniques. The next 4 episodes of this QDD Redux are taking the next steps. _________________________________________ If we're not careful with or ignore failure modes, we ca...
Apr 12, 2023•9 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Send us a text In this special episode of Quality during Design Redux, we're pulling episodes from our archive about test results analysis. In our Season 1 - Episode 93 titled "The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering", we talked about hypothesis testing: how it is used for lots of data analysis techniques. The next 4 episodes of this QDD Redux are taking the next steps. _________________________________________ In this episode we review sampling for design tests. We ...
Apr 05, 2023•16 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Send us a text A quiz: What statistical concept is used in these design activities? DOE (design of experiments) Sampling Test results analysis Gage R&R studies Test method validations SPC (with some rules in monitoring changes in a process) If you answered, "Hypothesis Testing", you're right on! Even if you’re not really into statistics, there’s still basics that we should learn and understand, especially in design engineering. One of those basics is hypothesis testing. So much of our decisi...
Mar 29, 2023•9 min•Ep. 93
Send us a text We all like effective and efficient working meetings. What do we do to plan them, or how do we improve our recurring ones? Are we prepared to do things differently? If so, we can collect information so we know what we want to improve and by how much. We talk about best practices of meeting evaluations for those that we plan and facilitate and those recurring team meetings. What about your meetings now? Do you think WHAT you do (its effectiveness) needs to be improved? Or HOW you d...
Mar 22, 2023•14 min•Ep. 92
Send us a text How do we even begin a design for the user without getting into engineering prototypes? Don't we need to do lots of iterations of prototypes and physical mockups to get design inputs from other people? While these things can be useful, they're not always practical or necessary, No - we don't need to do lots of iterations of different mockups to get design inputs. In fact, we want to explore the use space with our team before we even start engineering stuff, including the mockups. ...
Mar 15, 2023•16 min•Ep. 91
Send us a text How are quality tools Legos of development? We talk about two philosophies of brick building and our use of the family of quality tools. We also talk about seven uses of quality tools in product development. Visit the podcast blog for fun graphics. Other Quality during Design podcast episodes you might like: Choosing Quality Tools (Mind Map vs. Flowchart vs. Spaghetti Diagram) Quality as a Strategic Asset vs. Quality as a Control DISCOVER YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FOCUS: UNLOCK YOU...
Mar 08, 2023•12 min•Ep. 90
Send us a text What types of things might happen when we don't fully understand, explore, or address: the breadth of the whole concept space, a product's many users, and the voice of the customer? We explore a public consumer complaint and upset over coffee pods. And we imagine what may have happened (or didn't happen) during design development that could have helped avoid the issues from the start. We explore this ongoing, public story to gain some insight and maybe some lessons learned that we...
Mar 01, 2023•16 min•Ep. 89
Send us a text Dianna Deeney and Shere Tuckey talk about Crucial Conversations® in an engineering environment: how to prepare for and have difficult conversations with peers, managers, and everyone else. This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts". 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 produc...
Feb 22, 2023•39 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Send us a text This is the wrap-up, final episode of our series - the 7th episode in our series about generating ideas with a team toward action. Since the start of 2023, we focused on a few quality tools and methods to both generate ideas and then choose which idea to pursue. We've talked about: Changing our scope to a closed world, to failures or questions, or design heuristics Brainstorming within a problem-solving framework Grouping many ideas and then further refining them Prioritizing many...
Feb 15, 2023•18 min•Ep. 88
Send us a text We're in our 6th episode into our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The first two episodes were all about idea generation. The 3rd through 5th episodes was about using Quality Tools to help us group, explore, prioritize, and decide on an idea. This episode is exploring a Design Sprint, a method to develop a design concept with a team in 5 working days. We build upon what we've already covered, plus some big takeaways about brainstorming from the book, "Spr...
Feb 08, 2023•20 min•Ep. 87
Send us a text We're in our 5th episode of our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The first two episodes were all about idea generation. The 3rd was about grouping and exploring ideas. The 4th was about screening ideas. Now, we'll look at ways to compare ideas. We’re still considering that we're just after brainstorming, at the point where we have many ideas and no next steps. Let's compare ideas with our team so we can move toward action. We explore these Quality Tools a...
Feb 01, 2023•13 min•Ep. 86
Send us a text We're in our 4th episode into our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The first two episodes were all about idea generation. The 3rd was about grouping and exploring ideas. We’re still considering that we're just after brainstorming, at the point where we have many ideas and no next steps. Let's instead screen our ideas so we can move toward action. We explore these Quality Tools and how to use them after a brainstorming or other idea-generating team activit...
Jan 25, 2023•17 min•Ep. 85
Send us a text We're on our 3rd episode in our series about generating ideas with our team toward action. The previous two episodes were all about idea generation. We’re now at the point where we have many ideas and no next steps. Let's group and explore our ideas so we can move toward action. We explore these Quality Tools and how to use them after a brainstorming or other idea-generating team activity: Affinity Diagram team sorting method Fishbone Tree Diagrams Visit the podcast blog for more ...
Jan 18, 2023•15 min•Ep. 84
Send us a text This episode is part of our interview series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts". 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. Emily Haidemenos joins us to talk about brainstorming for product development. She hosted...
Jan 11, 2023•36 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Send us a text Sometimes we need to gather with our team and come up with some ideas. Whether we’re looking for new product ideas, trying to discover possible solutions, or need to improve a service, gathering a team to come up with ideas is common. What are some of the ways we approach this activity? We talk about systematic and structured methods and new approaches to brainstorming. Doing the same, old thing doesn't lead to new thinking and can leave us with stale ideas. We can try something n...
Jan 04, 2023•11 min•Ep. 83
Send us a text As engineers, we need to write reports all the time. Are ours getting returned by reviewers frequently? Or are we not getting any feedback and are not sure when our report is 'done'? We explore the spirits of technical writing past, present, and future. We explore how and why they help us to write for ALL of our audiences. Visit the podcast blog for excerpts. Other Quality during Design podcast episodes you might like: About Using Slide Decks for Technical Design Reviews QDD Book ...
Dec 28, 2022•12 min•Ep. 82
Send us a text What are the gifts others bring to new product development? It takes intentional actions and acknowledgement to understand how to bring design inputs into our designs from other people. We consider project teams like a neighborhood and how this frame of mind can help our designs. Visit the podcast blog . Other Quality during Design podcast episodes you might like: The DFE Part of DFX (Design For Environment and eXcellence) How to Self-Advocate for More Customer Face Time Product D...
Dec 21, 2022•12 min•Ep. 81
Send us a text 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 pod...
Dec 14, 2022•10 min•Ep. 80
Send us a text 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 rel...
Dec 07, 2022•10 min•Ep. 79
Send us a text 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...
Nov 30, 2022•8 min•Ep. 78
Send us a text 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...
Nov 23, 2022•10 min•Ep. 77
Send us a text 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 . DISCOVER YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FOCUS: UNLOCK YOUR IMPACT Take this quick quiz to cut through the 'design fog' and discover where your greatest...
Nov 16, 2022•17 min•Ep. 76
Send us a text 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 . DISCOVER YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FOCUS: UNLOCK YOUR IMPACT Take this quick quiz to cut through the 'design fog' and di...
Nov 09, 2022•10 min•Ep. 75
Send us a text 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 DISCOVER YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT FOCUS: UNLOCK YOUR IMPACT Take this quick quiz to cut through t...
Nov 02, 2022•12 min•Ep. 74
