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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.
Episodes
194 episodes
Beyond the Pipeline: Rethinking Engineering Careers with Cassie Leonard (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)
The episode features Cassie Leonard—former aerospace technical leader, executive coach, and author of STEM Moms and Beyond the Pipeline—explaining why the traditional linear “pipeline” model of engineering careers is constrict...
The Quiet System: Why Your Lessons Learned Aren’t Sticking
Your team keeps solving the exact same problems project after project. What if the issue isn't careless execution, but a reactive system designed to hide failures rather than learn from them? In this episode:• Discover how prote...
Shannon Cummings on Why Marketing Should Be in the Room Before the First Prototype (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)
Your team keeps building the wrong thing, despite great effort. What if the problem isn’t execution. It’s the fog you’re navigating in?We speak with Shannon Cummings, a seasoned product and marketing strategist who’s spent ...
Stop Being a Witness to Decisions That You Should be Helping to Shape
Have you ever walked into a meeting (design review, planning session, phase gate) only to realize the decision was already made? That the discussion was just theater, not dialogue? You weren’t there to shape the outcome. You were there to witne...
Karli Auble THRIVEs: Positive Psychology Meets Engineering Rigor (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)
In this episode of 'Quality during Design', we delve into how engineers can avoid mistakes and oversights by managing stress and enhancing performance. Host Dianna Deeney interviews Karli Auble, an engineering leader at a global fir...
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Constraints Unlock Creativity: Why Frameworks Beat Blank Slates in Product Concept Design
Your team keeps brainstorming into a void, producing “meh” ideas that never stick. What if the problem isn’t a lack of creativity but the absence of the right constraints?In this episode:• The Goldilocks principle ...
Cut Through The Design Fog
Early concept development often fails because teams lack clarity and alignment, leading to wasted time and resources. Discover the structured approach needed to cut through the "design fog" and ensure your team is building the right product fro...
The Design Fog is Derailing Your Project
Your team spent six weeks on a feature that got rejected in the demo. Your engineers built a prototype that totally missed the mark. This misalignment is the design fog, and it’s where most product failures are born in the uncomfortable ...
Expected Value Makes Uncertainty Manageable
Ever face a late-stage design decision where your gut says “maybe,” finance says “no,” and the schedule says “hurry”? We unpack a simple way to make those calls with more clarity: using expected value to connect confidence, upside, ...
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Define Kill Criteria to Avoid Zombie Projects
When pursuing aggressive benchmarks, engineers must employ portfolio thinking, running multiple design projects simultaneously. But choosing winners requires a decisive way to eliminate projects that are not feasible to continue innovati...
Confidence is a Dial: Turn It with Evidence, Not Guesswork
We turn late-stage design surprises into a strategic plan by assigning explicit confidence levels, stacking evidence, and using the three-dial model of time, cost, and confidence boost. We show how to work backward from a system test to cheaper...
Raise Your Confidence by Strategically Stacking Evidence
Late-stage design just hit a snag—now comes the moment that separates guesswork from great engineering. We walk through a clear, repeatable method to investigate unexpected failures and make high-impact decisions with confidence. Instead of hun...
Stop Risk Theater, Start Real Decisions
We break down why risk analyses often become checkbox theater and replace them with a simple, practical impact vs likelihood matrix that guides action. From quick wins to high-stakes unknowns, we show how to calibrate effort, buy the right lear...
How to Choose Risk Tools That Actually Help Decisions
If you reach for the nearest “risk” template, it might cause more problems.There are two very different jobs we ask risk tools to do. In this episode, we talk about how to pick the one that actually moves your project forward.
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Design clarity through cadence: aligning podcasts, Substack, and a playbook for teams
Big changes, clearer focus, and more ways to learn together. We’re tightening our cadence to two episodes a month and building monthly themes that travel across the podcast, blog, and a new Substack home—so you can go beyond ideas and into prac...
QDD Redux: Prioritizing Customer Satisfaction in Product Design (the Kano Model)
How do you balance customer wants with project constraints? If your customer-facing teammates are saying our customers want this, that and the other thing, which ones do we prioritize over others?Not all features are equal in the eyes o...
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Beyond Requirements: How Quality Methods Provide Actionable Design Inputs
Every product designer knows that critical moment when you must shift from understanding customer needs to actually engineering solutions. It's where the magic happens—and where many projects stumble.After a week of concept development ...
Map the User Journey: Design for Seamless Experiences
This episode explores the critical importance of evaluating the customer's use process during concept development. Rather than focusing solely on what your product does, understanding how users will interact with it creates opportun...
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Keven Wang’s 4-Step Journey to AI-Powered Quality Control (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)
What happens when cutting-edge AI meets manufacturing quality control? The results are nothing short of revolutionary.Keven Wang, co-founder and CEO of UnitX, takes us through the world of AI-powered visual inspection, where it is trans...
Design to Avoid Problems: Focusing on Symptoms Early On
Ever stood in that devastating moment when customers finally interact with your nearly-finished product only to hear them say, "I don't like that" or "This doesn't work for me"? After months of development and what you thought was adequate cust...
Slow Down to Speed Up: Jake McKee's Guide to AI Innovation (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)
What does it really mean to design relationships with artificial intelligence? Jake McKee, a community strategist with over two decades of experience working with companies like Lego and Apple, brings clarity to this complex question by introdu...
Uncovering Customer Desires: Understanding Benefits in Concept Development
What truly matters in product design – the features you create or the benefits users experience? In this exploration of a cornerstone concept, we dive into the critical distinction between benefits and features that can make or break your produ...
Blank Flipcharts Don't Make Magic, But Templates Do
That "fuzzy front end" of product development, where ideas should flourish, often becomes a frustrating quagmire of unfocused brainstorming sessions and competing perspectives. The truth is, traditional brainstorming doesn't work nearly as well...
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Why Your Cross-Functional Team Isn't Communicating Effectively (And How to Fix It)
Have you ever watched a promising product idea slowly die in the fuzzy space between "great concept" and "actual development"? You're not alone. The journey from product idea to market-ready solution contains a critical yet often o...
The Hidden Costs of Poor Concept Development in Product Design
The hidden costs of poor product development can devastate your project timeline, budget, and ultimate market success. Drawing from Dr. Robert Cooper's research, this episode reveals how skipping proper concept development—the critical "fuzzy f...
