During the development process you and team may work to understand what customers may want or expect for the new product. You may even conduct focus groups or review past product field failures and call center records. Alpha and beta testing are crucial components to the development process.

Your customers are your best testers for your next product. They will explore the features, expose the product to use conditions in unconscious ways, and let you what they consider failures without needing the specification document. Continue reading →

In an ideal world the design of a product or system will make use of perfect knowledge of all the risks and failure mechanisms. The designed product then is built perfectly without any errors or unexpected variation and will simply function as expected for the customer. Wouldn’t that be nice!

Along with perfect manufacturing and perfect materials, the assumption that we have perfect knowledge is the kicker though.

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