Lessons Learned from Coffee Pod Stories

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.

What are some of the lessons learned from coffee pod stories?

We explore this ongoing, public story to gain some insight that we can apply to our own designs.

[Read more…]

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

Dianna Deeney interviews Shere Tuckey about Crucial Conversations® in an engineering environment: how to prepare for and have difficult conversations with peers, managers, and everyone else. Shere gave a conference presentation about Crucial Conversations® titled, “How to be Persuasive Rather than Abrasive.”

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 product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.

About Shere

Shere is a Branch Chief in the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. She is responsible for advocating, planning, budgeting, organizing, and directing the execution of a high-priority technology development portfolio as well as direct supervision and management of all personnel within the branch. Over the last twenty-nine years, she has managed twelve different teams across many engineering disciplines from shock physics experimentation to weapon effects modeling and simulation.

Shere has taken a special interest in leadership, mentoring, and helping teams communicate effectively. After being asked to serve as the Dean of Leadership for her organization’s workforce development program, she became certified to teach the Crucial Conversations® course as a foundational element of leadership development.

She has taught five highly rated classes to high level managers, junior employees, and everyone in between. The positive feedback received from these classes and the course’s universal applicability, has motivated Shere to share this knowledge in as many forums as possible.

Shere and Dianna talk about:

• what makes a dialogue a Crucial Conversation®
• how she discovered the Crucial Conversation® framework
• why she trains others at her work in the Crucial Conversations® model and champions its use

Shere also shares stories of success.

Listen to take your communications skills to another level, at work and everywhere else.

[Read more…]

Challenges Getting Team Input in Concept Development

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 ideas by comparing them to 2 criteria or by using team voting
• Choosing an idea by using paired comparisons or a structured decision-making solution like DMRCS
• Giving individuals a process to create a full design concept

We also interviewed an expert in brainstorming and learned the importance of planning for teamwork, including choosing our team.

What have we learned through the last few weeks? Let’s highlight take-aways and next steps.

[Read more…]

Brainstorming within Design Sprints

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.

There’s one more method to consider in this series: a design sprint.

A design sprint utilizes all of these things we’ve been talking about. We talk about the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days and how these ideas fit together.

[Read more…]

After the ‘Storm: Compare and Prioritize Ideas

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 and how to use them after a brainstorming or other idea-generating team activity:

• paired comparison
• prioritization matrix
• DMRCS

[Read more…]

After the ‘Storm: Pareto Voting and Screening Methods

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 activity:

• 2×2 chart
• Systematic list reduction
• Multivoting or Pareto Voting

[Read more…]

After the ‘Storm: Group and Explore Ideas

We’re in our 3rd episode into 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

[Read more…]

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

Dianna Deeney interviews Emily Haidemenos about product design with brainstorming. She hosted a workshop at a conference about this topic, titled “Brainstorming: The Solution to Structured Problem Solving”.

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 product development, and how they’re involved and work with product design engineering teammates.

About Emily

Emily has a master’s degree in Design and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.  After initially working as a Design Engineer, Emily left and moved into a New Product Development Quality Engineering position.  In this role, she worked with multiple cross-functional engineering teams to ensure the effectiveness of quality systems while earning her Six Sigma Black Belt certification.  Now as a Chief Engineer for next generation high voltage automotive products, she aims to grow and develop a team of technically competent individuals who realize their maximum potential.

Emily and Dianna talk about:

• some of the common pitfalls of brainstorming from a perspective of taking defensive action against those pitfalls.
• the basic steps of brainstorming, but then circle back to the planning phase. There’s a lot we can do in the planning phases, and Emily shares specifics about planning for brainstorming so we can get the most out of it. Including setting up those defenses.
• best practices for leading a brainstorming session. Emily shares the successes she’s had with it, and what her team thinks about it.

Listen to be inspired to either take on brainstorming or change-up how you’re doing your sessions!

[Read more…]

Ways to Gather Ideas with a Team

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 we 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.

[Read more…]

The Spirits of Technical Writing Past, Present, and Future

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 – they help us to write for ALL of our audiences. We explore how and why in the episode.

[Read more…]

The Gifts Others Bring

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.

[Read more…]

Next Steps after Surprising Test Results

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.

[Read more…]

Choose Reliability Goals for Modules

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 reliability goals for modules of our product design. And we talk about its limitations.

[Read more…]

Start a System Architecture Diagram Early

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 get started and ways we can continue to iterate on it throughout development to help us communicate and make decisions.

[Read more…]

Why Yield Quality in the Front-End of Product Development

During the product development process, are there so many design prototypes but the team’s still not getting buy-in?

Are design concepts changing mid-development after it’s “too late” to change the design?

Are designs picked-apart only after they’re nearly done?

Late in development, are there many fires to fight with too many surprises at test?

Quality during Design is not about compliance activities. It’s about being proactive with our team in early development. And knowing how to have conversations that gets us what we need so we can engineer 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 we focus on in Quality during Design: risk-based decisions, quality and reliability engineering partnership, and the user’s process.

[Read more…]