Before You Start Engineering Solutions, Do This
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.
Episode Transcript
Thanks for listening!
Any thoughts on going beyond the project budget scope by being too proactive?
Sure! Budgets are a constraint point.
I think you’re asking about early team meetings blowing the budget because of cost per person. Or that it gives too many opportunities to add lots of bells and whistles when they’re not wanted or needed, making a product more difficult to engineer and expensive to make.
At this point in a project, the opportunity has already been identified and some needs drafted. That will initially bind the scope.
Part of proactively working with the team is to ensure that we’ve got the user and use space defined well – better understanding it through exploring what the team thinks would create benefits, lead to symptoms, be a delight to use – which is also giving us design inputs and priorities.
We don’t want to circle the drain of indecision and have endless numbers of meetings and talks either, because that could lead to project scope creep, too. By having a few structured working meetings with a team, we’ll have that information up-front for design and their input is wrapped into the design from the start. Those few (3 or so) meetings are opportunities for the design team and the cross-functional team to really get alignment.
If we design solutions first, we’re going to be designing by reaction and could end up in a situation where it’s a product design that we didn’t really want (as a group) but we’ve spent so much time and development energy on it that we just have to go with what we’ve got. That might meet budget and a market release date, but not be easily made or be what the customers want to buy or will be happy with.
We can be proactive with our team in early meetings, manage budget and market release, and design what the customers want.
Thanks for the question! Please reach out if you’d like to talk more.