Quality during Design
Dianna Deeney
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About This Podcast
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.
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Recent Episodes
S6E22 The Most Expensive Question You Didn't Ask
Engineering rework often comes from unasked questions or using the wrong tool at the wrong fidelity. Dianna outlines three common prototyping traps: the “ta-da” trap, where teams build polished…
S3E20 Local LLMs: Where to Actually Start, with Vincent Deeney (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)
Most of the social conversation around AI is aimed at business owners and programmers, but if you’re an engineer or quality professional, you might be wondering how to actually use these tools to…
S6E21 The Knowledge Your Team Has That Nobody's Using
Late-breaking insights in product development aren’t caused by negligence but by a lack of structure that pulls existing team knowledge into concept discussions early, when changes are…
S3E19 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…
S6E20 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…
S3E18 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…
S6E19 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…
S3E17 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…
S6E18 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…
S6E17 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…
S6E16 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…
S6E15 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…
S6E14 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…
S6E13 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…
S6E12 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…
S6E11 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…
S6E10 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…
S6E9 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…
S6E8 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…
S6E7 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…
Frequently Asked Questions
Quality during Design has published 197 episodes since March 2021, covering topics in Business, Careers.
Quality during Design is currently highly active with new episodes every 2 weeks. Average episode length is 11m.
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