Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
  • Reliability.fm
    • Speaking Of Reliability
    • Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast
    • Quality during Design
    • Way of the Quality Warrior
    • Critical Talks
    • Dare to Know
    • Maintenance Disrupted
    • Metal Conversations
    • The Leadership Connection
    • Practical Reliability Podcast
    • Reliability Matters
    • Reliability it Matters
    • Maintenance Mavericks Podcast
    • Women in Maintenance
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • RCM Blitz®
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinars
    • Journals
    • Higher Education
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • 14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge
    • Reliability Analysis Methods online course
    • Measurement System Assessment
    • SPC-Process Capability Course
    • Design of Experiments
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Quality during Design Journey
    • Reliability Engineering Statistics
    • Quality Engineering Statistics
    • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
    • Process Capability Analysis course
    • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
    • Return on Investment online course
    • CRE Preparation Online Course
    • Quondam Courses
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Live Events
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home

by Dianna Deeney Leave a Comment

QDD 126 Exploring the Problem Space: A Key Principle for Robust Product Design and Project Success

Exploring the Problem Space: A Key Principle for Robust Product Design and Project Success

Ever wonder why many product designs fail or why projects don’t always come out as planned? The answer might lie in how we approach the ‘problem space’ versus the ‘solution space’.

We’re celebrating two and a half years of Quality During Design podcast by revisiting the fundamental principles that guide our product design processes, and exploring how we can apply these principles to avoid common pitfalls.

We talk about the importance of staying longer in the problem space, using quality tools for teamwork, and understanding the power of pre-work in meetings.  Listen-in to challenge our thinking and push us to rethink how we engage with new projects. Plus, gain insights on how questioning, investigating, and experimental approaches during project planning will empower you to refine your design processes.

We’re inviting you to consider how the Quality During Design methodology can streamline your design process, reduce product failures, and create more meaningful customer experiences. This isn’t just about designing products; it’s about redefining how we perceive and approach the entire design process.

 

 


View the Episode Transcript


Today’s takeaway

Many of us skip half of the problem space when we’re getting introduced and involved in new projects. We jump from an idea to a solution space and we miss half of the project planning opportunities where we’re experimenting and questioning and investigating, really developing the design inputs that we’re going to need in order to make great designs in the solution space.

Quality during Design is about using quality tools for facilitated teamwork to stay in the problem space a little longer, to do that experimenting and that investigating, to research the problem space, for design inputs that are going to feed into whatever your product design decisions are going to be later. And when we are building and designing and prototyping, we can take those analyses that we did earlier and iterate them in further detail or with a different quality tool, an analysis tool that can help us and our team further make decisions about what it is we’re designing.

When we’re using Quality during Design, it’s not that we are designing and creating the final product in a meeting. It’s a way for us to choose useful activities so that we can understand more about the problem space and the user, so that we can ultimately design great products.

Next Steps

Explore the blog at QualityduringDesign.com Throughout this podcast and on the podcast blog at QualityDuringDesign.com, we’ve explored a lot of these quality tools and their uses for product design. Using these quality tools for design purpose will certainly help you communicate with your team about your design concepts within this problem space, this questioning and experimentation space.

If you think Quality During Design may be a good fit for your organization or for you individually, contact Dianna.

Talk with Dianna to consult. Dianna consults with companies on how to incorporate these techniques within their existing product development process. Quality during Design is a supplement to your existing product development process to help your teams do more upfront concept work and to better integrate your usability and risk management programs.

Ask Dianna to be a coach. Dianna also offers her services as a coach to individuals Anyone who wants to learn these techniques and better their positioning as a product designer by working more closely with their cross-functional team.

 


Episode Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the Quality During Design podcast. I was surprised to figure out not that long ago that this podcast is about two and a half years old, so there’s a little bit of celebrating going on over here at Quality During Design. Since that first episode, we’ve gone on a bit of a journey with you, our listeners. We’ve had some special series where we’ve introduced quality topics in a versus series. We did cross-functional collaboration series. We also have an interview series where we invite people from other cross-functional disciplines that work in product development and talk to them about how they would best be utilized as part of product design decisions. Our overall goal and vision for Quality During Design hasn’t really changed that much, but we have developed over these last two and a half years. We now have better frameworks that we can communicate our ideas and help people with implementing ideas. We have more services and more ways to interact with you, our listener. I am proud of all of those things, but after two and a half years, I think it’s time to kind of get back to our roots, really talk about some of the foundations and frameworks that we use for product design. Today I want to reintroduce you to Quality During Design and get you to think more about how all the things that we’ve been talking about over the last few years how you can implement that into your product design decisions and when you should do it. Let’s talk more about the big picture right after this 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 Deeney. I’m a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. Listen in and then join us. Visit QualityDuringDesigncom.

I have a question for you that I want you to take a moment and consider how do you engage with new projects?

Let’s say that you are assigned to a new project. Someone’s already come up with an idea. They see a problem in the field that they want to solve and they’ve identified some needs, which is that gap between where customers currently are and where it is they really want to be, what they want to have accomplished with our product design. But we got this big question mark in the middle of where our customers are now to where they want to be, and that question mark is our product.

Now you’re being asked to join a cross-functional team to develop and design a product that fills that customer’s need. Where do you start your task? With being the product designer. So at some point during the development project you’re going to be making decisions daily about what this is going to look like, what components to choose, what materials to pick, the layout of it, the different interactions that it has. There’s a lot of fun stuff that has to do with design and at some point you’re going to be having to make those decisions. So how do you get started with making those decisions?

And, as you’re designing, how are you making those decisions? Do you get involved with actively planning the project or do you wait for somebody to tell you when to jump in, when it’s the right time in the project to provide your input? Do you wait for information from other people in order to be able to move forward with your next steps? I mean, we’re part of a cross-functional team so other people from different backgrounds have input into what it is we’re designing.

What most of us do is we jump from the product idea. Hey, we’ve got an idea. It’s going to solve a problem. Our customers are going to be so excited about it. This is a real market opportunity. Let’s design something about that.

And then what we do is we immediately jump right into the solution space, where we start designing, we start doing engineering designs and layouts, we start building prototypes. And we do that because that’s what we do. We have a problem, we start solving it, and then we reach out to our team and ask for feedback. Hey, I designed this, took me a couple weeks, maybe three. What do you think about it? And they say, wow, that isn’t what we were expecting at all. This isn’t exactly the way that we want to go. This isn’t going to meet our customers’ needs. I call that scenario the ta-da flop, because ta-da, here it is, and flop nobody likes it.

Now I know that we jump from idea to the solution space because it’s happened to me. I’ve seen other people do it, I’ve talked to other people and they’ve experienced the same thing, and it’s also in a lot of literature. Robert G Cooper publishes about this. He’s somebody that publishes a lot of books about product development processes. He gets a lot into why a lot of new product designs fail in the field and new product development projects fail because the cross-functional team didn’t do as much early fact-based investigation into their concept idea before they started designing things. This is also reflected in how big things get done by Bent Flyjug and Dan Gardner. They talk about how there is a lot of questioning, investigating and experimentation that could be done in planning that just isn’t, because people jump to the solution space too quickly.

Let’s think of the problem space in two parts. The first part of the problem space is the idea. That’s where we identify an idea for a product. That’s where we’re innovative and we do market studies.

That second part of the problem space is really where we start questioning and investigating. We’re doing research into the problem space, into our concept design, before we get to the solution space.

The solution space is where we start designing and building things, prototyping things, showcasing them to other people, maybe for more feedback.

When we skip that second part of the problem space that questioning and investigating space, we’re missing out on half of the project planning opportunities and we also may experience symptoms like this

  • I create too many different versions of my product before it’s finally done.
  • I have a hard time getting feedback from my team.
  • My work is nearly done and then it gets picked apart by everyone,
  • or the worst is that products fail so many validation tests with our users, we have to go back and redesign everything.

These are all things that we may experience as the product designers when we skip that second step of investigating within the problem space.

And this is where quality during design has a big effect. Quality during design is about using quality tools for team work, co-work, facilitated work with a cross-functional team to stay in the problem space a little longer, to do that experimenting and that investigating, to research the problem space, for design inputs that are going to feed into whatever your product design decisions are going to be later.

And when we are building and designing and prototyping, we can take those analyses that we did earlier and iterate them in further detail or with a different quality tool, an analysis tool that can help us and our team further make decisions about what it is we’re designing. Quality during design takes those tools and ideas that are normally applied in manufacturing at the end of the production line and we move them up front to help you with design inputs and design decisions before and when you’re designing.

Quality during design is not brainstorming, not your typical brainstorming sessions that you may have participated in before. With typical brainstorming, it’s considered free work and expansion of ideas, creative prioritization and unusual ideas and lots of questions. Instead, quality during design utilizes pre-work. We’re not showing up to these facilitated meetings with our cross-functional team with nothing. We do some pre-work with our quality tools ahead of time. During the meeting there is prompted discovery. We prioritize ideas based on criteria, which is usually related to the quality tool. We encourage creativity with co-work and, most importantly, the quality during design drives actions.

When we’re using quality during design, it’s not that we are designing and creating the final product in a meeting. It’s a way for us to choose useful activities so that we can understand more about the problem space and the user, so that we can ultimately design great products.

Quality during design concepts can be used by anyone on the cross-functional team to help develop concept designs. It’s most useful when whoever is designing the product, whoever is later going to be making those daily decisions about the details of the design. It’s helpful if they facilitate the meetings with the cross-functional team because they’re working with their team to develop those design inputs. This is a learning opportunity with your cross-functional team. Our goals with these working meetings is to get alignment with our team, to discover things that they know that we may not have even thought about, to examine the ideas that we have and then prioritize them based on meaningful criteria that’s associated with the user: how the user benefits from using our new product, what some of the symptoms could be if things go wrong, how they get from point A to B and how we can make that the best experience possible.

I’ve distilled a lot of information about quality tools and design and development processes and came up with the quality during design frameworks. I’ve taken my own experience as a quality engineer working on new product development projects, my work with other people who do similar things and then some of the best practices that people share with everyone. I created Quality During Design to be a very practical and team-oriented approach. There’s a focus on action and activities, getting to answers with a cross-functional team the kind of answers that a product designer would need to know when they designed their product. It incorporates elements of usability engineering and risk management that can feed into and coordinate with the kind of systems you may already be using for that. They could be a team input into your usability and risk management systems that you already have, and it’s scalable.

I never recommend that you do all the analyses on everything all the time. You pick what it is that you need to do. Take some time to figure out what questions it is you need to ask and, as questions arise as you’re working with your team, you can scale things again to focus in on the areas where you need better answers or that really need to have clarity. Over these next few weeks, I’ll be describing a little bit more about the methodology and some of the background of Quality During Design.

Today’s takeaway is that many of us skip half of the problem space when we’re getting introduced and involved in new projects. We jump from an idea to a solution space and we miss half of the project planning opportunities where we’re experimenting and questioning and investigating, really developing the design inputs that we’re going to need in order to make great designs in the solution space.

Throughout this podcast and on the podcast blog at QualityDuringDesign.com, we’ve explored a lot of these quality tools and their uses for product design. Using these quality tools for design purpose will certainly help you communicate with your team about your design concepts within this problem space, this questioning and experimentation space.

I also consult with companies on how to incorporate these techniques within their existing product development process. Qualityduring Design isn’t a product development process in itself. Each company has their own way of developing products. I understand and respect that, and QualityDuring Design is not a substitute for it. It is a supplement to your existing product development process to help your teams do more upfront concept work and to better integrate your usability and risk management programs.

I also offer my services as a coach to individuals Anyone who wants to learn these techniques and better their positioning as a product designer by working more closely with their cross-functional team.

So that is where Quality During Design resides with respect to the new product development process.

If you think Quality During Design may be a good fit for your organization or for you individually, contact me. My contact information is at QualityDuringDesigncom and you can find me on LinkedIn. I look forward to talking with you next week about cross-functional collaboration. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.

Filed Under: Quality during Design

About Dianna Deeney

Dianna is a senior-level Quality Professional and an experienced engineer. She has worked over 20 years in product manufacturing and design and is active in learning about the latest techniques in business.

Dianna promotes strategic use of quality tools and techniques throughout the design process.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Quality during Design podcast logo

Tips for using quality tools and methods to help you design products others love, for less.


by Dianna Deeney
Quality during Design,
Hosted on Buzzsprout.com
Subscribe and enjoy every episode
Google
Apple
Spotify

Recent Episodes

QDD 128 Leveraging Proven Frameworks or Concept Development

QDD 127 Understanding Cross-Functional Collaboration

QDD 126 Exploring the Problem Space: A Key Principle for Robust Product Design and Project Success

QDD 125 Exploring Product Development and AI Through Literature

QDD 124 Design for User Tasks using an Urgent/Important Matrix

QDD 123 Information Development in Design, with Scott Abel – Part 2 (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 122 Information Development in Design, with Scott Abel – Part 1 (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 121 Crafting Effective Technical Documents for the Engineering Field

QDD 120 How to use FMEA for Complaint Investigation

QDD 119 Results-Driven Decisions, Faster: Accelerated Stress Testing as a Reliability Life Test

QDD 118 Journey from Production to Consumption: Enhancing Product Reliability

QDD 117 QDD Redux: Choose Reliability Goals for Modules

QDD 116 Reliability Engineering during Design, with Adam Bahret (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 115 QDD Redux: 5 Options to Manage Risks during Product Engineering

QDD 114 The Instant Glory of Projects

QDD 113 What to do about Virtual Meetings

QDD 112 QDD Redux: How to self-advocate for more customer face time (and why it’s important)

QDD 111 Engineering with Receptivity, with Sol Rosenbaum (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 110 Don’t Wish for Cross-Functional Buy-in on Product Designs – Plan to Get It!

QDD 109 Before You Start Engineering Solutions, Do This

QDD 108 QDD Redux Ep. 4: Statistical vs. Practical Significance

QDD 107 QDD Redux Ep. 3: When it’s Not Normal: How to Choose from a Library of Distributions

QDD 106 QDD Redux Ep. 2: How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

QDD 105 QDD Redux Ep. 1: How Many Do We Need to Test?

QDD 104 The Fundamental Thing to Know from Statistics for Design Engineering

QDD 103 What to do for Effective and Efficient Working Meetings

QDD 102 Get Design Inputs with Flowcharts

QDD 101 Quality Tools are Legos of Development (and Their 7 Uses)

QDD 100 Lessons Learned from Coffee Pod Stories

QDD 099 Crucial Conversations in Engineering, with Shere Tuckey (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

QDD 098 Challenges Getting Team Input in Concept Development

QDD 097 Brainstorming within Design Sprints

QDD 096 After the ‘Storm: Compare and Prioritize Ideas

QDD 095 After the ‘Storm: Pareto Voting and Screening Methods

QDD 094 After the ‘Storm: Group and Explore Ideas

QDD 093 Product Design with Brainstorming, with Emily Haidemenos (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

QDD 092 Ways to Gather Ideas with a Team

QDD 091 The Spirits of Technical Writing Past, Present, and Future

QDD 090 The Gifts Others Bring

QDD 089 Next Steps after Surprising Test Results

QDD 088 Choose Reliability Goals for Modules

QDD 087 Start a System Architecture Diagram Early

QDD 086 Why Yield Quality in the Front-End of Product Development

QDD 085 Book Cast

QDD 084 Engineering in the Color Economy

QDD 083 Getting to Great Designs

QDD 082 Get Clarity on Goals with a Continuum

QDD 081 Variable Relationships: Correlation and Causation

QDD 080 Use Meetings to Add Productivity

QDD 079 Ways to Partner with Test Engineers

QDD 078 What do We do with FMEA Early in Design Concept?

QDD 077 A Severity Scale based on Quality Dimensions

QDD 076 Use Force Field Analysis to Understand Nuances

QDD 075 Getting Use Information without a Prototype

QDD 074 Finite Element Analysis (FEA) Supplements Test

QDD 073 2 Lessons about Remote Work for Design Engineers

QDD 072 Always Plot the Data

QDD 071 Supplier Control Plans and Design Specs

QDD 070 Use FMEA to Design for In-Process Testing

QDD 069 Use FMEA to Choose Critical Design Features

QDD 068 Get Unstuck: Expand and Contract Our Problem

QDD 067 Get Unstuck: Reframe our Problem

QDD 066 5 Options to Manage Risks during Product Engineering

QDD 065 Prioritizing Technical Requirements with a House of Quality

QDD 064 Gemba for Product Design Engineering

QDD 063 Product Design from a Data Professional Viewpoint, with Gabor Szabo (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

QDD 062 How Does Reliability Engineering Affect (Not Just Assess) Design?

QDD 061 How to use FMEA for Complaint Investigation

QDD 060 3 Tips for Planning Design Reviews

QDD 059 Product Design from a Marketing Viewpoint, with Laura Krick (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

QDD 058 UFMEA vs. DFMEA

QDD 057 Design Input & Specs vs. Test & Measure Capability

QDD 056 ALT vs. HALT

QDD 055 Quality as a Strategic Asset vs. Quality as a Control

QDD 054 Design Specs vs. Process Control, Capability, and SPC

QDD 053 Internal Customers vs. External Customers

QDD 052 Discrete Data vs. Continuous Data

QDD 051 Prevention Controls vs. Detection Controls

QDD 050 Try this Method to Help with Complex Decisions (DMRCS)

QDD 049 Overlapping Ideas: Quality, Reliability, and Safety

QDD 048 Using SIPOC to Get Started

QDD 047 Risk Barriers as Swiss Cheese?

QDD 046 Environmental Stress Testing for Robust Designs

QDD 045 Choosing a Confidence Level for Test using FMEA

QDD 044 Getting Started with FMEA – It All Begins with a Plan

QDD 043 How can 8D help Solve my Recurring Problem?

QDD 042 Mistake-Proofing – The Poka-Yoke of Usability

QDD 041 Getting Comfortable with using Reliability Results

QDD 040 How to Self-Advocate for More Customer Face Time (and why it’s important)

QDD 039 Choosing Quality Tools (Mind Map vs. Flowchart vs. Spaghetti Diagram)

QDD 038 The DFE Part of DFX (Design For Environment and eXcellence)

QDD 037 Results-Driven Decisions, Faster: Accelerated Stress Testing as a Reliability Life Test

QDD 036 When to use DOE (Design of Experiments)?

QDD 035 Design for User Tasks using an Urgent/Important Matrix

QDD 034 Statistical vs. Practical Significance

QDD 033 How Many Do We Need To Test?

QDD 032 Life Cycle Costing for Product Design Choices

QDD 031 5 Aspects of Good Reliability Goals and Requirements

QDD 030 Using Failure Rate Functions to Drive Early Design Decisions

QDD 029 Types of Design Analyses possible with User Process Flowcharts

QDD 028 Design Tolerances Based on Economics (Using the Taguchi Loss Function)

QDD 027 How Many Controls do we Need to Reduce Risk?

QDD 026 Solving Symptoms Instead of Causes?

QDD 025 Do you have SMART ACORN objectives?

QDD 024 Why Look to Standards

QDD 023 Getting the Voice of the Customer

QDD 022 The Way We Test Matters

QDD 021 Designing Specs for QA

QDD 020 Every Failure is a Gift

QDD 019 Understanding the Purposes behind Kaizen

QDD 018 Fishbone Diagram: A Supertool to Understand Problems, Potential Solutions, and Goals

QDD 017 What is ‘Production Equivalent’ and Why Does it Matter?

QDD 016 About Visual Quality Standards

QDD 015 Using the Pareto Principle and Avoiding Common Pitfalls

QDD 014 The Who’s Who of your Quality Team

QDD 013 When it’s Not Normal: How to Choose from a Library of Distributions

QDD 012 What are TQM, QFD, Six Sigma, and Lean?

QDD 011 The Designer’s Important Influence on Monitoring After Launch

QDD 010 How to Handle Competing Failure Modes

QDD 009 About Using Slide Decks for Technical Design Reviews

QDD 008 Remaking Risk-Based Decisions: Allowing Ourselves to Change our Minds.

QDD 007 Need to innovate? Stop brainstorming and try a systematic approach.

QDD 006 HALT! Watch out for that weakest link

QDD 005 The Designer’s Risk Analysis affects Business, Projects, and Suppliers

QDD 004 A big failure and too many causes? Try this analysis.

QDD 003 Why Your Design Inputs Need to Include Quality & Reliability

QDD 002 My product works. Why don’t they want it?

QDD 001 How to Choose the Right Improvement Model

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy