Product Design Review: Say-What? Why? Who? When? How?

June 27, 2008

And who must participate in one... why, how and when? First of all, it's important to be aware that one can have many different definitions describing what a product design review is, and these definitions may vary greatly across various industries. The attempt herein is to explicitly define the Product Design Review so as to distinguish it from other product, project, market and technology reviews that are common during a product development project. It's quite important to know the difference between all these 'reviews' so that appropriate budgeting, staffing, goals and expectation-setting occurs for each. Also, the significance of the product design review will be demonstrated.

The discussion herein mostly applies to light industrial and commercial product development efforts. Highly complex projects such as designing a new passenger jet, a manned exploration of Mars, etc. will need more complicated consideration. However, the essence of this article will still apply to those highly complex projects as Greer and Black point out in their research "Improving Inter-Organizational Baseline Alignment in Large Space System Development programs"1.

Now, as to what a product design review is: for the purposes of this article and within our context of product development projects:

Richard M Haney

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