How to Self-Advocate for More Customer Face Time (and why it's important) Artwork

Quality during Design

Quality during Design is the podcast for engineers and product developers navigating the messy front end of product development. Each episode gives you practical quality and reliability tools you can use during the design phase — so your team catches problems early, avoids costly rework, and ships products people can depend on.

You'll hear solo episodes on early-stage clarity, risk-based decision-making, and quality thinking, along with conversations with cross-functional experts in the series A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts.

If you want to design products people love for less time, less cost, and a whole lot fewer headaches — this is your place.

Hosted by Dianna Deeney, consultant, coach, and author of Pierce the Design Fog. Subscribe on Substack for monthly guides, templates, and Q&A.

All Episodes

Quality during Design

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

December 01, 2021 • Dianna Deeney • Episode 40

0:00 | 12:00

There are many stories of design successes attributed to the right level of understanding of the customer. Product designers make decisions, daily, about how a product is going to look and perform. So, we need to really understand the customer. And, to really get the customer, engineers need to spend time with them.

Sometimes, the business doesn’t want us to interact with the customer or doesn’t think it would be valuable. Objections include that we're not prepared for the user's environment, that we're too blunt or honest, or that we just overgeneralize what we learn, anyway. Or, there's a reluctance because of costs. Besides seeing these objections first hand, someone also listed them out in a published book! This shows that this is common across industries.

Is that fair to design engineers? No matter if it’s fair or not. We can prepare ourselves to address those objections. We talk about how we can prepare ourselves to self-advocate for more customer face time.

Visit the podcast blog.

Send us a message

Support the show

If your team is still catching problems too late — let's talk.
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Want insights like this?
→ Subscribe to my newsletter: qualityduringdesign.substack.com

Get the full framework.
→ Pierce the Design Fog

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.