Shipulski On Design

Define your business problem.

Assess the market to make it a commercial problem.

Define how you differ from your competitors.

Define everyone’s lines of improvement.

Project things into the future.

Define what you’ve got to improve to leapfrog your customers and yourself.

Test the new concept with customers.

Once validated, convert your commercial improvement objective into a technical problem.

Define the problem as an interaction between two system elements that touch.

Define the problem in time – before, during, and after the problem occurs.

If possible, solve the problem before it happens.

If you can’t, solve it while it happens.

If you’re in a hurry, solve it after the problem while you solve it during or before.

Make a prototype that demonstrates you solved the technical problem.

Show the prototype to customers to verify it’s still something worth solving.

File the patents.

Create the sales tools and convert them into a product specification.

Create a project plan and define the team to create the new product.

Make the first prototype and test it.

Show it to your suppliers and manufacturing crew and listen to their thoughts on how to reduce cost.

Incorporate the feedback and design out half the parts.

Take a risk and order the parts with long lead times.

Make the alpha units, show them to customers, and define the next improvements.

And while you’re doing that, test them, break them, and fix them until you run out of time.

Create the high-volume manufacturing and assembly processes for the beta build.

Make the beta systems and let customers use them.  Listen to their feedback.

Update the sales tools and send the beta systems to customers to validate the offering.

Train the sales team.

Build the production units and fill the shelves.

Sell, sell, sell.

It’s important to execute each of these tasks well. But that’s not enough because they’re not independent.  They’re interconnected. The upstream tasks shape the downstream tasks and the downstream tasks shape the upstream tasks. To get that shaping right, you need people who know all elements of the work and who can work across organizational and company interfaces.  Those people are few and far between and invaluable.

The design engineer who can work with customers, marketing, and manufacturing.  The manufacturing engineer who can work with design engineers, suppliers, and customers.  The marketing leader who can speak engineering, manufacturing, customer, and supply chain.  And the unicorn who can do every task, speak everyone’s language, empathize with all subject matter experts, accompany the sales team on tricky customer visits, recognize good work and publicly praise it.

All the tasks and deliverables are important.  But more important is knitting everything together so upstream inputs feed downstream activities and downstream activities shape upstream inputs.  Most important is that special person who can knit, shape, guide, cajole, praise, and actively help with all of the deliverables and all of the work.

When the wheels fall off, you know who to call.  When the work is new, you know whose office provides good guidance.  When there’s misalignment, you know who can do the realigning.  And when local optimization is driving the wrong behavior, you know where to find the global optimizer.

Image credit — Irene Steeves – Boy  Monk Meditating