Reliability Engineering during Design, with Adam Bahret (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts) Artwork

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.

All Episodes

Quality during Design

Reliability Engineering during Design, with Adam Bahret (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

June 21, 2023 • Dianna Deeney • Season 3 • Episode 6

0:00 | 45:42

Dianna Deeney interviews Adam Bahret about reliability engineering during design: how product design engineers and product development leadership can incorporate reliability engineering.

This interview is part of our series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts". Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team within engineering projects. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they're involved and work with product design engineering teammates.

About Adam

Adam Bahret is the founder of Apex Ridge Consulting and a leading reliability expert who writes, speaks and coaches executive teams on reliability as a competitive edge. His reliability-culture change program has delivered millions in savings for clients while mitigating risk and forming a foundation for reliability-fueled growth and brand dominance. His clients range across multiple industry segments, including medical devices, robotics, semiconductor, aerospace, consumer, and automotive.

Adam works with technical teams to improve the design while mentoring leadership teams in adopting the processes, language, and behaviors to build a reliability culture. He also introduces key reliability metrics such as “time-to-reliability” that guide organizational thinking and build a robust reliability culture that’s the hallmark of dominant top-performing technology companies.

Adam has deep technical expertise and over 25 years of experience in product development and reliability engineering. He has an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University, is an ASQ nationally certified reliability engineer, and an international speaker on technology, leadership, and product development. More information on Adam and Apex Ridge can be found at www.apexridge.com.

Adam and Dianna talk about:

What "time to reliability" is, and how it can be used to measure the completeness of a project instead of other metrics, like date of prototype release.
How naming problems helps others identify with it and provides an avenue to solve and measure results.
The trap of not incentivizing reliability leadership metrics.
The mindset shift needed by product design engineers to design for reliability.
How Reliability Engineers can be an advisor, not opposition.
Things teams can do to avoid being traumatized by FMEA.

Visit the podcast blog for additional information and links, including a list of Adam's books.

Ready to apply this to your project?
→ Schedule a free discovery call: Dianna's calendar

Want insights like this?
→ Subscribe to my newsletter: qualityduringdesign.substack.com

Learn the full framework:
→ Get the Book: Pierce the Design Fog

ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.