Before the Answers
Your Quality during Design Digest
I’m working through one more case study to showcase concept development processes. This one is a consumer product, electro-mechanical, focused on margins and the risks of customer returns. I’ll publish the results in June. It’s different, still, from the other 3 scenarios I’ve published:
service design: What happens when it’s not a product, but a service? Reputation is on the line and the use process is paramount.
medical device: Safety and compliance dominate. Can the process handle liability and risk?
agricultural retrofit: Productivity in tough environments. How can we prevent failures with design?
The results are turning out to be the similar: better context, more focus on users, better engineering design inputs than the traditional concept development practice.
My next trials will be to run a different level of greenlight packet into the AI system, to see what comes of it. More to come!
Dianna
Quality during Design has been brought to you since 2021 from Deeney Enterprises and Dianna Deeney. This is the monthly digest sent on the first Friday of the month: gain insights, podcast highlights, and resources for engineering and product development professionals.
This month’s highlights at a glance:
📅 June’s Theme — We’re going beyond systems into the practical day-to-day practices.
📋 May’s Recap — Better outcomes start with better timing. We focused on how early clarity reduces rework, misalignment, and late‑stage surprises.
🎙️ Podcast + Blog — An AI‑powered comparison of development approaches shows why premature certainty is costly, and the follow‑on article outlines the structural moves that keep teams aligned from the start.
💬 Interview — A grounded discussion on adopting local LLMs without the hype, focusing on real workflows, real constraints, and real potential for learning.
Coming up in June
We’ve been working through upstream thinking all spring: moving quality earlier, structuring knowledge, building intentional systems. They ultimately come down to a habit: asking the right question before committing resources.
Each month we’ve zoomed in: org-level → system-level → knowledge-level.
June continues zooming in to the practice level: what does it actually look like when an individual engineer or team does this well day to day?
Podcast, long-form article, and a guest conversation this month.
May recap
From AI‑driven product development experiments to a conversation on where to actually start with local LLMs, May’s theme was all about surfacing clarity earlier and working smarter together.
Free Content
🎙️ Podcast Episode: Local LLMs: Where to Actually Start, with Vincent Deeney Vincent Deeney (technologist and AI enthusiast) joins Dianna to break down how to run large language models (LLMs) on your own hardware. Use them to not only save tokens but to learn the limits of AI through hands-on practice. They’re not as powerful, but you can get real work done with modest equipment. No programming required. Listen → https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/s3e20
🎙️ Podcast Episode: The Knowledge Your Team Has That Nobody’s Using Leaders often blame late surprises on people or tools, but this episode shows the real culprit: timing. Learn how to avoid premature certainty. Listen → https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/the-knowledge-your-team-has-that-nobodys-using/
🔍 Strategic Insights: Your Concept Development Isn’t Done Just Because It Produced Answers The accompanying article turns that insight into action, outlining the specific structural moves that help teams avoid rework and make better early decisions. Read → https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/articles/your-concept-development-isnt-done-just-because-it-produced-answers/
📖 The method is in Pierce the Design Fog — available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook.
🤝 Workshops and advisory engagements at deeneyenterprises.com.
Conversations
Fred and I got a chance to chat a lot last month on the Speaking of Reliability Podcast:
SOR 1177 The Reliability Contract - What expectations and agreements help reliability engineers function effectively as internal consultants? And how do we go about setting them wisely?
SOR 1176 Reliability and Volume - How do reliability challenges shift between one-of-a-kind NASA hardware and mass-produced consumer products? Which tools work everywhere, and which lose power when your sample size is one?
SOR 1170 Lifecycle Target Misalignment - When lifecycle targets don't match customer expectations or business strategy, teams build the wrong thing. When do you choose the gold-plated version versus the cheapest possible?
How to engage with me
If your organization is tired of firefighting what could have been prevented, let's talk. https://qualityduringdesign.com/talk
-Dianna