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Quality during Design
Quality During Design helps engineers build products people love—faster, smarter, and with less stress. Host Dianna Deeney, author of Pierce the Design Fog, shares practical tools and quality thinking from concept to execution. Subscribe on Substack for monthly guides, templates, and Q&A.
Quality during Design
Design clarity through cadence: aligning podcasts, Substack, and a playbook for teams
Big changes, clearer focus, and more ways to learn together. We’re tightening our cadence to two episodes a month and building monthly themes that travel across the podcast, blog, and a new Substack home—so you can go beyond ideas and into practice with tools, Q&A, and live community sessions.
Here’s what’s new and why it matters. The podcast keeps its familiar format, but now each month has a focused theme that carries into Substack deep dives. Subscribers get comprehensive guides, open Q&A weeks where we answer your specific questions in the comments, and a one-hour live chat each month to pressure-test methods on real scenarios. It’s a smarter learning loop: listen, explore, apply—then come back with better questions. You’ll also get access to the strategy vault filled with templates, worksheets, and facilitation guides.
We’re also thrilled to announce the launch of Pierce the Design Fog, a practical playbook for product, engineering, and UX teams who need structure without losing speed or humanity. With models like the concept space and ADEPT framework, you’ll align cross-functional teams, turn insights into actionable design inputs, and make confident calls under uncertainty. There’s a companion card deck—Concept Quest: Design Discovery—that acts like a portable facilitator, with prompts and instructions to guide workshops. Pre-order before October 14, 2025, to enter the card deck giveaway and bring these methods straight into your team’s next session.
Subscribe to the show, check out the Substack at qualityduringdesign.substack.com, and leave a review to help more builders find us.
Are your teams struggling with poor communication and rushed timelines? Is your product vision clouded by a lack of clarity? It's time to find your way through the confusion and build products that truly resonate with users.
Introducing "Pierce the Design Fog" by Dianna Deeney, the essential guide to turning abstract ideas into high-quality products. This book offers a proven playbook with practical frameworks and tools to help you foster team synergy, lead with vision, and ma
JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK Subscribe today. Get themed Q&As, live chats, in-depth analysis, comprehensive guides, and access to my Strategy Vaults. Founding Member spots are open now.
PICK MY BRAIN Got a particular problem you’d like clarity on? Schedule a 60-minute virtual call with me - we’ll work through it together.
ENROLL IN MY COURSE FMEA in Practice: from Plan to Risk-Based Decision Making is enrolling now. Lifetime access, practical tools, and over 300 students already learning.
GET THE BOOK Pierce the Design Fog is your playbook for concept development to engineering design inputs.
VIEW MY OTHER SERVICES Visit my website to learn more.
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.
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 Deaney. 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 on how to apply quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityderingdesign.com. Hello, listener, I'm Diana Deaney. This is a special updates and announcements podcast episode for Quality During Design. Today is October 2nd, 2025. If you're a longtime listener, you'll know that I rarely do these kinds of episodes. But this was a regularly scheduled time for me to be podcasting. So if you're following the podcast, you'd expect to get an episode today. And there are changes to the podcast and some other things with Quality During Design that I wanted to let you know about so that you're not surprised and you know what to expect and you know what other opportunities there are for us to work together. Since you're listening to the podcast, I'll tell you about the podcast news first. Right now, our podcast is bi-weekly, so every other week there is a new podcast that's dropped. We're going to change this to two podcasts per month. That's not a huge change, but it is a change that I wanted to let you know about. The podcast topics and format are going to be similar. And I'll also continue to create blogs on my website. So none of that is changing. It's just the cadence of when podcasts are released. When there are interview episodes, I'll likely treat them as special episodes. There may be a one-drop in addition to the two per month that I'll be releasing. Now, why this change? The change is because I'm going to be switching to monthly themed content. Whatever we're covering on the podcast is also going to be covered in Substack. So this is my second bit of news for today. Existing subscribers know that in September I moved away from just email updates to Substack. I've started to populate things on Substack, and you can take a look at it at quality during design.substack.com. Substack is going to allow us to do several things. First, if you're a subscriber, you'll continue to get the monthly digest and email, but they're also cataloged in Substack, so you can easily go back and view previous monthly digests or posts. You have a choice here. You can continue to get newsletters and emails, or you can use the Substack app. There's an app you can install on your phone, and there's also a Substack website. So in general, there are different ways that you can interact with the content that I'm producing every month. This move to Substack is also going to allow me to do monthly themed posts. I will go deeper into the podcast episode topics, and I'll also include comprehensive guides. These guides are going to have QA sessions to them. So for one week out of the month, I'll open comments on the comprehensive guide or the deep dive episode, and we'll have QA in the Substack comments. You'll post a question and I will answer them in the comments section. And then you'll also have a record of that. As a subscriber, you can go back and take a look at the QA for that post. Substack will also allow us to do chats. One hour per month, I'll have a live Substack chat to further develop some of the strategies for the applications based on the theme of the month. This is why Substack is a good mood for us. It'll allow us to have themed monthly content, allow us to go a little deeper into the content, into actual application and how-tos and strategies, and we can use the Substack comments and chat functions to be able to do this. Subscribers on Substack will also get access to my vaults. These are worksheets, templates, strategic guides, all from my work. Some of them you can use immediately, some of them you can use to start planning. And as we're developing these monthly themed content, I'll keep adding to the vaults. So the podcasts and the blogs and monthly digests remain free and will largely remain the same. The Substack subscriptions are paid subscriptions. What you're paying for is the ongoing mini consulting sessions and services. The subscriber fees pay for my time and research tools to be able to produce this content with you. And it's a way that you can work with me to get your questions answered. Since this is new, there's a founding member tier called the Strategist Tier, which gives you access to the one hour chat, my strategy vault, and savings on my one-on-one Pick My Brain sessions. You can read more about all these subscription levels on quality during design.com slash about and pick the one that's best for you. I look forward to seeing you on Substack and working with and interacting with you there. Last but not least, October 15th is the official launch date of my new book, Pierce the Design Fog. Develop high quality products faster through team innovation. This is a practical playbook designed for professionals in product design, engineering, and user experience. It will help you align cross-functional teams for better collaboration, prioritize user experiences to avoid costly missteps, and transform insights into actionable design inputs. I'm very pleased and honored to get an endorsement from Drew Boyd, who is the co-author of Inside the Box. Inside the Box has been transformative for many teams and companies that want to be innovative. Drew says, if you're serious about building better products, Diana Deaney's book is a game changer. With powerful tools like the concept space model and adept framework, she shows how cross-functional teams can collaborate with purpose and clarity. This is structured creativity at its best, practical, rigorous, and deeply human. A must-read for innovators everywhere. You can pre-order Pierce the Design Fog now. When you pre-order by October 14th, you can enter a giveaway for a chance to win its companion card deck. The card deck is titled Concept Quest Design Discovery, and it's a 52 card deck. It just happened to work out that way. It helps you to execute on the methods in the book, especially with the co-working sessions and working with your team. These cards can be used to help you plan out facilitation team meetings. You can also use them as guides during your team meetings to help you keep on track with what you're supposed to be doing or what kind of questions to ask your team. There's a quick visual prompt on the front, and on the reverse side of the card are more specific instructions if you need them. There's also cards that relate to prioritization methods that you can share with your team to help them prioritize the ideas that you're coming up with. You can see more about the book and the card deck at Piersthed Designfog.com. And you can enter the giveaway to win the card deck at PierceThedesignfog.com slash giveaway. So that's what I wanted to share with you in this special updates and announcements episode of the Quality During Design podcast. There's been lots of activities on the back end, and you'll be seeing a lot more activity on Substack in October. Stay tuned for our October deep dive, which will be about design decision making under uncertainty. Ensure you subscribe so you can interact with that QA and live one-on-one sessions. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thank you very much for listening and continuing to be a supporter of quality during design.
