Quality during Design

206 Episodes

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Customer Discovery Across Product Stages, with Ashley Phillips

2026-10-2239:32

Ashley Phillips joins Dianna to discuss how customer discovery changes across startups, hypergrowth teams, and established products. Customers may surprise a team with new ways to use a product, while the environment around a long-standing product can change enough to make old assumptions stale. Ashley shares examples from Venmo, Groupon, and Aura Frames, and explains why direct customer contact, real prototypes, usage data, and curiosity all matter when teams are deciding what to build next....

Two Ways We Jump: Speed and Certainty

2026-10-0809:34

In this solo episode of Quality during Design, Dianna looks at two reasons product development teams jump from a partial understanding of a problem to a committed solution: speed and certainty. Fast prototyping, generative AI, and 3D printing can make building feel harmless, but activity only creates value when it answers a specific question and informs a decision. Certainty can create the same design fog more slowly, when familiar customers, old requirements, or past successes ar...

When Building Gets Cheap, Decisions Matter More, with Ashley Roach

2026-09-2437:11

Fast prototyping changes the constraint. When software, AI tools, and other rapid-prototyping methods make it inexpensive to turn an idea into something testable, the challenge is no longer only Can we build it? The harder questions become: What should we build? Who is it for?What evidence do we need?When should we stop tweaking and get it in front of people?Which decisions are reversible—and which ones will lock in future choices?In this episode, Ashley Roach and I discuss how speed can hel...

Why Do We Jump? About the Moment Before We Commit

2026-09-1006:54

When a project goes off track, we usually look back and say, “We didn’t define the problem, and we jumped.” That sounds like a process breakdown, as if one good checklist or gate approval would have prevented it. But design fog runs deeper than missing process. It’s what’s happening in us. Over the next few episodes on Quality During Design, we’re exploring a quieter question: When we jump to a solution, why? Before we understand the problem, we start building. We skip questioning and inve...

The Cracks Between Good Designs, with Mike Fedorov (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

2026-08-2740:46

Why do well-designed initiatives keep coming apart when they reach reality? Mike Fedorov, who spent 26 years in supply chain and operations at Mars and Accenture and now co-leads Applied AI Labs, explains that the failure usually isn’t a bad call inside a single design. It’s the coordination layer: the seams between teams, systems, and the data that no one remembers how to work. He walks through a transformation that stalled for months, what AI can actually do to close the gap, an...

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