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Quality during Design
Quality during Design is a production of Deeney Enterprises, LLC. It is a podcast for product designers, engineers, and anyone else who cares about creating high-quality products. In each episode, we explore the principles of quality design, from user-centered thinking to iterative development. We introduce frameworks to make better design decisions and reduce costly re-designs. We explore ways to co-work with cross-functional teams. We also talk to experts in the field about their experiences and insights.
Join host Dianna Deeney in using quality thinking throughout the design process to create products others love, for less. Whether you're a seasoned designer or just starting out, looking to improve your existing designs or start from scratch, Quality during Design is the podcast for you.
Quality during Design
Blank Flipcharts Don't Make Magic, But Templates Do
That "fuzzy front end" of product development, where ideas should flourish, often becomes a frustrating quagmire of unfocused brainstorming sessions and competing perspectives. The truth is, traditional brainstorming doesn't work nearly as well as we've been led to believe.
Drawing from research and decades of experience, this episode reveals why teams facing blank flipcharts produce fewer and lower-quality ideas than those using structured approaches. The solution? Visual models and templates—powerful frameworks that channel creativity rather than stifling it. These tools have transformed quality improvement efforts for nearly a century, and they can revolutionize your concept development process too.
You'll discover how a telecommunications company implemented a simple template change that generated 300% more high-quality ideas in a fraction of the time. We explore why activity theory explains the effectiveness of these approaches, and how proper template design aligns team thinking toward customer-focused solutions. Visual models provide the structure teams need to collaborate effectively, maintain focus, and prevent confusion—turning abstract conversations into concrete design inputs.
Whether you're struggling with cross-functional alignment or searching for ways to improve your team's innovative output, this episode offers practical insights to transform your concept development process. The fuzzy front end doesn't have to be chaotic. With the right visual frameworks, you can guide your team toward designing products customers will love.
Ready to elevate your development process? Listen now, then visit qualityduringdesign.com for more resources to implement these approaches on your next project.
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About me
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 optimize their engineering processes and team performance by promoting the use of reliability and quality methods during design. She offers consulting services for managers and directors, training for engineers through the Quality During Design program, and other practical resources.
Welcome to the Quality During Design podcast. I'm Diana Dini. The last couple episodes we've been talking about concept development as part of product development. Concept development is that fuzzy front end at the beginning of a project. You have identified a product idea but you haven't started engineering it yet, you haven't started designing it yet. It's that fuzzy front end of product development where we're still defining things and learning and investigating about the use space, our customer, the problem space, and in the last few episodes we talked about why it matters. It matters to the bottom line. It matters to how successful our product is in the field, if our project gets launched at all, how customers feel about it, market shares, all the business bottom lines and our experiences and just working in product development. It's also difficult because we are working with a team of diverse viewpoints that might be coming at the same problem from a different space. They may actually be thinking that they're solving a different problem, so we may not be aligned on that and we talked about that in the last episode. So concept development is important but it's difficult, not just because of teens, but because we don't have anything to talk about. We haven't developed anything yet.
Speaker 1:Open brainstorming hasn't seemed to work very well. In my own experiences and experiences of others, and from what I've read too, researchers have studied it that open brainstorming teams actually give fewer and lower quality ideas than in other methods. The team leader in a meeting in front of a blank flip chart, that team will produce fewer ideas and those ideas will be less high quality than if that team leader was using a template. Is something as simple as a model or a template. Allow us to talk with our team and explore concept development, that fuzzy front end, and actually get to design inputs. Yes, they can. Let's talk more about it after this brief introduction. Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products. Others love for less. I'm your host, diana Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals and how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom.
Speaker 1:A challenge with concept development is we don't have anything to talk about. Sometimes we can go and generate some prototypes rapid prototyping to be able to create something that our team can then tweak and revise, and there's definitely a place for prototyping and more than just in concept developmentability, engineers test prototypes and halt testing to see what's the weakest link. There are also a lot of use cases for prototyping to get initial customer feedback, but when we're working with our team in concept development, we don't have anything to work on, we don't have a prototype or we don't want to spend the money and time to make prototypes, which could get expensive. What do we do? Just showing up at each other's desks or just calling a meeting to openly talk about stuff doesn't really seem to work. However, having a visual model or a visual template that the team is working against, co-working against, to develop ideas toward a given end that works. So what is it?
Speaker 1:A visual model represents a system, a process or concept. Models include diagrams and charts. They help people understand, analyze and communicate complex information. Some models can be complicated like three-dimensional models of an engineered product. For concept development, models represent ideas and will be simpler yet still meaningful.
Speaker 1:A visual template is a structured framework designed to facilitate and guide the creative process within a team. It helps teams brainstorm in a structured way, organize and develop innovative ideas, and all this in a visually engaging and systematic way. A popular template is a business model canvas. The business model canvas is a tool used to plan and understand businesses. It's like a map that shows different parts of a business, such as what it offers and how it makes money. It shows how all these parts fit together so businesses can make decisions. That's an example of a visual template.
Speaker 1:Other examples of visual models and templates are a lot of quality tools. Quality teams like Continuous Improvement and Six Sigma teams have used models and templates for years to help them work together with success. Some of the models that I've used include flowcharts, five whys and cause-effect diagrams I've used include flowcharts 5Ys and cause-effect diagrams, fishbone diagrams and even the eight disciplines. Methodology uses a template. These types of quality tools are visual models and templates that have countless stories of success for nearly 100 years across different disciplines ones. It's not just in the quality world, though. There are other design teams that use visual models and templates to be able to work in design. A couple of examples are Inside the Box, with systematic inventive thinking and using Sprints to solve big problems and test new ideas. In just five days, I'll include links in the blog to a couple of episodes where we covered those methodologies. To be able to adapt this for concept development.
Speaker 1:We have to think about why these tools have been so successful. What is it that they do for our teams and for us to be able to break down complex ideas into something that's actionable For one? They provide structure Instead of just meeting open-ended. We have something that we're working on together. We have certain ideas or things that we want to explore, which is another reason why they work is because they limit the scope of what it is we're working on, especially in concept development. If we open up ideas to the whole world, then we might not get anywhere with our concept development. That doesn't mean that we aren't thorough in making sure that we cover all the bases. It's just a matter that every time you get together, you don't necessarily need to have your whole team on all the bases. Let's just get everybody to first base and talk about that. The other thing that visual models and templates do is they help us to systematically collect and generate ideas with a team. We can think about what kind of thought process has to go into coming up with an idea and then structure our models and templates to be able to help our team in that way.
Speaker 1:Here's an interesting study that kind of demonstrates this. It was a multinational telecommunications company. They were seeking ideas for a five-year product pipeline. They asked employees to take part in unstructured brainstorming for six months using a generic visual template. Now, this template prompted them to give their idea a headline, describe it in a nutshell and then sketch it. There was also space on the template for employees to list how their idea might relate to existing business platforms. So what's the idea? What's the name of it? Give us a sketch of it, and how does it relate to what we have already? In over six months, people generated 93 ideas, but only three were considered high quality. Here's where the researchers got involved. They helped the company leaders change their visual template to be more specific to innovation. The template was about the same size as the previous one, but asked different questions with a single deadline. It still required an idea name and description, but it also asked employees to identify prospective customers, their motivations to use the product and the benefits they would derive from it. This time, with the edited visual template, the process resulted in 11 high-quality ideas in a single session, versus over six months. So this change from the generic template to the specific template represents more than 300% improvement in the number of high-quality ideas represents more than 300% improvement in the number of high-quality ideas and, in addition to that, using the structured process with a visual template saved the company two months of work.
Speaker 1:Visual models and templates are successful because of their association with activity theory. Activity theory is used to understand team activities. It's used most often in educational research, psychology and organizational studies. According to this theory, using shared and easy-to-understand tools improves teamwork, maintains focus and prevents confusion. These tools or objects are clear, memorable and ensure everyone focuses on the same things. Clear, memorable and ensure everyone focuses on the same things. A couple of important things that are coming out of this here is that visual models and templates work, but their effectiveness rely on their design and their alignment with the task at hand.
Speaker 1:In our telecommunications company example, there was a template. They were using it, people were filling it out and it was generating ideas. But when they focused more on what it is they were trying to do, they weren't just trying to gather wild ideas. They were trying to gather ideas that would fit into their current business structure, that customers would love and provide customers new benefits. Just the addition of those additional ideas to that template got people to think and contribute ideas in a different way. They wanted innovation and they wanted happier customers. So they asked for that from their employees, from their personnel, and they got those ideas, a lot of those quality tools that I mentioned. Sometimes they fit with the problem that you're trying to solve and sometimes they don't. People have used them for many years so they have experience using them in a particular spot to solve a particular problem or to get a team to think about certain things at a point in a project. That's why some of those larger systems like the 8D problem solving why it works because it's helping you choose the model or template that's going to work for you at the time that you need it.
Speaker 1:We can develop the same kind of thing for concept development have visual models and templates that help our team do concept development with the aim of getting design inputs that we can design against. And those inputs are going to be focused on our customers and their experience and overall it'll help us in that whole questioning, investigation, fuzzy, front end of product development. It won't be so fuzzy. With visual models and templates we'll reduce the fuzziness, increase the quality of our ideas and generally have better teamwork. So what's today's insight to action, structured approaches to working with a team. It works. We get more high quality ideas and in concept development it leads to targeted design inputs, if we do it right.
Speaker 1:If you like this kind of content and these topics and want to learn more about quality and reliability and how it applies to product design development, then visit qualityduringdesigncom and sign up for the newsletter. On the website there are a lot of free resources and you can learn more about the quality during design approach. Also, there are a couple of big announcements coming, so if you subscribe to the newsletter, you'll be the first to know about these big things. They're going to be resources that are really going to help you with your product development processes and working with your cross-functional team. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.
