When a product developer puts together a list of product requirements (which is one immutable commandment of all successful product development methodologies) the list should cover all uses of the product and all environments in which the product is expected to be shipped, stored and used. This article strongly advises that, additionally, a product design must include consideration of as many conceivably unintentional uses and environments as feasible. It may be impossible to fathom every case, but some holistic thought, investigation, interviewing, creative thinking and brainstorming will uncover potentially real situations a product developer may never customarily consider.

Make sure that the managers and executives become aware of the unspecified so that risk analysis can be done to protect the business and to gauge the amount of engineering needed for producible and marketable products. The major driving forces for considering such unspecified wear and tear is to minimize risk and product liability and to prevent potential economic damage from excessive warranty burden.

It's also very important that if a product can be easily taken into unintended environments or used in unintended ways it must be designed (and validated) to do so. However, if it's not feasible to prepare the product for all cases, then disclaimers must be made obvious to the user. The disclaimers can either be in user documentation or clearly manifested in the design.

Within any of the successful product development methodologies, product requirements need to be thoroughly developed to include specified wear and tear, but… special consideration needs to be practiced to discover, design for, and validate to unspecified wear and tear criteria. This will provide much greater assurance that a product will be as robust as possible, thus minimizing a company's liability, support and warranty costs and preserving customer satisfaction.




For other articles about product development, quality and production by Dick Haney see his Author Page