Quality during Design

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.

Podcasting since 2021 • 197 episodes

Quality during Design

Latest Episodes

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 prototypes to impress...

June 11, 2026 • Season 6 • Episode 22 • 8:15

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 help with your own work processes or informat...

May 28, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 20 • 36:29

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 cheaper. Dianna describes an experiment running...

May 14, 2026 • Season 6 • Episode 21 • 10:48

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 engineering careers is constrict...

April 23, 2026 • Season 3 • Episode 19 • 34:13

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 episode:• Discover how prote...

April 09, 2026 • Season 6 • Episode 20 • 8:36