Your Knowledge Is the Asset. Structure Is How You Use It.
Your Quality during Design Digest
I started a new video series, and I’m pretty excited about it.
The premise is simple: take a product concept, run it through concept development twice. Run it once with a traditional structured method and once with the Pierce the Design Fog frameworks. Use the same cross-functional team and the same product brief. Then compare what engineering actually receives at the end.
Not what the method promises. What it produces.
I’m using AI-powered cross-functional team agents (six functions: engineering, manufacturing, quality, marketing, sales, and customer success) to run both trials. The AI is the mechanism that makes it possible to run two complete concept development cycles on the same product quickly enough to compare them directly. The story is what comes out.
The first two case studies are up now. One is a Class II medical device (a portable oxygen concentrator for COPD patients). The other is a service product (a post-installation service redesign for a residential solar company). Two very different product types, same experiment.
I chose these deliberately. The medical device case tests whether concept development can produce outputs that feed directly into HFE and risk management (analyses you’re required to run anyway). The service case tests whether the same methods work when there’s no physical product at all, just operations and user experience.
More case studies are coming. The playlist will grow as they publish.
📺 Watch the series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTtGpfRyyNcZ9qMVL2HmWA7heE3Idyfbt
📖 The method is in Pierce the Design Fog — available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook.
🤝 Workshops and advisory engagements at qualityduringdesign.com.
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:
📅 May’s Theme — Your team’s expertise isn’t missing. It’s just not showing up when it matters. What changes when you fix that.
📋 April Recap — Accidental systems, accidental outcomes. A solo episode on why lessons learned don’t stick, a conversation with aerospace engineer Cassie Leonard on engineering careers, and an article on why organizational problems aren’t personality problems.
🎙️ Conversations — I joined another show to talk about why good designs pass every review and still fall apart in manufacturing.
Coming up in May
Most product development teams don't have a knowledge problem. They have a structure problem. The expertise about failure modes, customer workarounds, and past design decisions exists…it's just not organized to show up when it matters. What changes in concept development when you fix that? What does engineering actually get? And how can you tell whether your team's knowledge is working or just sitting there?
Podcast, long-form article, and a guest conversation this month.
Free for all: Podcast episodes and blogs on deeneyenterprises.com.
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April recap
April was about pulling back the curtain on why organizations think they’re improving while quietly repeating the same patterns. One theme kept surfacing across everything I published: when systems are accidental, outcomes are accidental too.
Free Content
🎙️ Podcast Episode: The Quiet System: Why Your Lessons Learned Aren’t Sticking Teams aren’t careless — they’re operating inside systems built to react, not learn. This episode breaks down why organizations keep rediscovering the same problems and how protective structures unintentionally block information flow. Listen → https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/the-quiet-system-why-your-lessons-learned-arent-sticking/
🎙️ Podcast Episode: The ROI of Engineering Motivation with Cassie Leonard (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts) Aerospace engineer and executive coach Cassie Leonard joined me to challenge the long‑held “pipeline” model of engineering careers. We dug into why linear career thinking fails both people and products — and what a more adaptive, human-centered approach looks like. Listen → https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/podcast/s3e19
🔍 Strategic Insights: Intentional Organizations Don’t Happen by Accident When something slips, leaders often look at behavior. But the root cause I see most often, both inside organizations and across industries, is systemic: unclear ownership, overlapping responsibilities, structures that create territorialism, and information that never travels to the people who need it. These aren’t personality problems. They’re design problem. Read → https://deeneyenterprises.com/qdd/articles/intentional-organizations-dont-happen-by-accident/
Conversations
Why Good Designs Fail
I was a guest on another podcast this month to talk about something that doesn't get enough attention: the invisible gaps between design, quality, and production. If you've watched a design move smoothly through every review and still fall apart in manufacturing, you know exactly what I mean. We dig into why no single team "owns" those handoffs — and how leaders can redesign them so quality isn't something you inspect at the end, but something you architect from the start.
How to engage with me
If your organization is tired of firefighting what could have been prevented, let's talk. https://calendly.com/dianna-deeney/discovery-call