Getting information and gathering priorities early is a great way to start design. There are more up-front conversations, but you end up with more value for the time spent colleting rather than reacting. Here's a comparison of a development with and without Quality during Design.

You involving the cross-functional team (marketing, commercial operations, regulatory) in your design decisions is a valuable responsibility. Sometimes, we don’t even know where to start or what to ask. And they’re not sure what to tell you. Using quality frameworks can help you to work with your cross-functional team by helping to be people-focused, use risk-based thinking, uncover ideas, navigate decisions with data, and empower all of your team to be part of the design process.

The Quality during Design Journey is a curated collection of quality tools to help product design engineers with early concept work. These quality tools have been used in many other areas of industry and through different industries.

The Quality during Design Journey also helps engineers prepare for and facilitate working meetings with their cross-functional teams, with quality tools at the center.

I want to make it fast and easy for you while still helping you to get early, fact-based information.

Budgets are a constraint point and a good thing to ask about.

Early definition and concept development are inputs into the rest of the design process and prevent issues and difficulties later.

You could be asking about early team meetings blowing the budget because of cost per person. Or that it gives too many opportunities to add lots of bells and whistles when they're not wanted or needed, making a product more difficult to engineer and expensive to make.

At this point in a project, the opportunity has already been identified and some needs drafted. That will initially bind the scope.

Part of proactively working with the team is to ensure that we've got the user and use space defined well - better understanding it through exploring what the team thinks would create benefits, lead to symptoms, be a delight to use - which is also giving us design inputs and priorities.

We don't want to circle the drain of indecision and have endless numbers of meetings and talks either, because that could lead to project scope creep, too. By having a few structured working meetings with a team, we'll have that information up-front for design and their input is wrapped into the design from the start. Those few (3 or so) meetings are opportunities for the design team and the cross-functional team to really get alignment.

If we design first, we're going to be designing by reaction and could end up in a situation where it's a product design that we didn't really want (as a group) but we've spent so much time on it we just have to go with what we've got. That might meet budget and a market release date, but not be easily made or be what the customers want to buy or will be happy with.

We can be proactive with our team in early meetings, manage budget and market release, and design what the customers want.

You'll be generating information that you'll use for design and will have visual and graphical representations of those concepts.

• Take photos of what you and your team worked on, or save files.
• Take minutes and track action items.
• Link your new design inputs to customer needs more easily.
• Show you prioritized inputs based on customer satisfaction and risks.

With the information you learn from your team through the Fast Track facilitation, you can iterate on that through task analyses, FMEAs, and requirements matrices. The Fast Track steps gives you and your team an excellent start to further develop those areas of product development proactively and more easily, so you can use them for design.