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: 

1. the “ta-da” trap, where teams build polished prototypes to impress stakeholders before the concept is stable, anchoring the team to an early solution
2. the “I’m smarter than cardboard” trap, where engineers skip low-fidelity physical models in favor of analysis even when the real question is usability
3. the “validation theater” trap, where teams default to expensive, validation-level rigs before confirming they’re asking the highest-risk, right question. 

All three share a root cause: jumping from idea to build without defining what must be learned and the appropriate fidelity. 

She invites listeners to subscribe for a future episode on prototyping done well.

02:08 Trap 1: The 'ta-da' trap

04:19 Trap 2: The "I'm smarter than cardboard" trap

05:43 Trap 3: The "validation theater" trap

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ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in. 

Transcript

The Most Expensive Question You Didn't Ask

Dianna 0:00

Welcome to the Quality during Design podcast. I'm your host, Dianna Deeney. If you're a repeat listener, thanks for coming back and for subscribing. If this is new to you, welcome. We talk about product development in the manufacturing industry, everywhere from concept development to making decisions in late stage engineering to develop products that people will actually love and use. Sometimes engineering has to do some rework. Usually, it isn't caused by bad answers. This engineering rework is caused by questions that were never asked or the right questions answered with the wrong tool at the wrong fidelity. We can use prototypes to answer some of those questions, but there are three common traps that I've seen engineers get stuck in. Let's talk about these prototyping traps after the brief introduction. Prototypes can inject a lot of benefits to new product development. But we can apply it at the wrong time or spend too much time developing it and not really getting answers to the questions that we should be asking. I wanted to introduce the three traps that I see most often in engineering with prototypes.

Trap 1: The 'ta-da' trap

Dianna 2:08

The first trap I call the ta-da trap. This is when a team builds a polished prototype to impress stakeholders, but before the concept is even stable. Somebody is presented with an idea or a problem, and they hand it to engineering. As engineers, we are trained to solve problems. If somebody gives us a problem or an idea to fix a certain problem, we're likely jumping into the solution space where we can figure out how to solve the problem. So we start designing before we have all the information that we may need. we build a polished prototype to impress stakeholders before the concept is even stable. It looks great in the review. We can ooh and awe everybody with this great product concept, and it does generate excitement to be able to look at and hold a prototype, interact with it. But now the team is anchored to it. Fixedness kicks in. They've invested time, money, and now ego into a physical thing, and every subsequent conversation becomes about refining this solution rather than exploring whether it's the right solution. The ta-da prototype skips past the hard conceptual work and replaces it with something that feels like progress but isn't. I talk about this trap a lot in Pierce the Design Fog. I replace this trap with structured concept development, actually having co-working meetings around structured content ideas, so you can develop an idea before you start designing it, before you start putting physical shapes to it or figuring out how it's going to work. The whole point of structured concept development is to stay in the problem space long enough that when we do build something, we're building the right thing.

Trap 2: The "I'm smarter than cardboard" trap

Dianna 4:19

The second trap that I see engineers do in relation to prototypes is the "I'm smarter than cardboard" trap. This is the engineer who skips the low fidelity check because they can instead model it, simulate it, or calculate their way through it. This one is really seductive because it feels rigorous. You ran the analysis, you check the numbers, and you're confident. But some questions just aren't calculation questions. If you're building something that's going to need maintenance and somebody needs to interact with that device, you don't necessarily need to model that device in CAD all day. Maybe instead you need to build a low-fidelity physical model with cardboard or foam or whatever you have in order to just test it out at the extremes. Sometimes our question in product design isn't "what are the dimensions", it's "can a human use this"? It's a different kind of question, and it needs a different kind of answer. The trap is mistaking analytical confidence for real-world knowledge. Sometimes a simple prototype can just give you that real-world knowledge.

Trap 3: The "validation theater" trap

Dianna 5:44

The third trap I see with prototyping is the "validation theater trap". This is when we're building an elaborate test rig or prototype to answer a highly technical question that sounds rigorous and sometimes genuinely is. This is the most nuanced trap because sometimes it's the right call. If you're working at the edges of known physics, like fluid dynamics for a pressure injectable catheter or an implantable heart pump, there's no cardboard shortcut. You need the expensive rig because the question itself is expensive. The trap here isn't necessarily the tool, it's the default. It's when teams reach for validation level testing before they've done the conceptual work to know they're even asking the right question. The discipline is making sure we've exhausted the cheaper, lower fidelity ways of learning before we commit to the expensive one, and making sure the question we're answering with that expensive rig is actually the highest risk unknown, not just the most technically interesting one.

Conclusion

Dianna 6:58

Those are the three traps that I see the most often: the "ta-da" trap, the "I'm smarter than cardboard" trap, and the "validation theater" trap. All three of these traps had the same root cause. It's that the team jumped from, "we have an idea", to "let's build something", without spending enough time in the middle asking, what do we actually need to learn and what's the right fidelity to learn it? That middle space between having an idea and committing to a direction is where the most valuable engineering thinking happens, and it's where most teams spend the least time. If you've fallen into one of these traps, it's all right. It's part of the engineering experience. But it's good to stand back and recognize it so you don't fall into those traps. And I invite you to subscribe to the channel because our next episode, we'll be talking with an engineer who does prototyping the right way. This has been a production of Deeney Enterprises. Thanks for listening.