Being involved in the development of various high-tech products over many years has led me to be quite definitive about specific terms used in the product development (PD) business. The reason is that we engineers, designers and developers (a.k.a. Techies) need product descriptions and criteria that are concrete enough to measure or assess so we can be certain we have designed what has been stipulated. Such exactitude has definable and pragmatic actions, which help circumvent various potential problems during PD efforts.

This approach is necessary because I've encountered situations within PD activities where naivete, presumptions, negligence or sometimes just arrogance, myths and duplicities, have enabled perfunctory product implementations; i.e., "Let's just get the job done for as little as possible and move on to the next project!" Needless to say, in most of these cases the results have caused liability, financial and image problems that mostly had negative effects on the products and companies.

Product developers help conceive and define, experiment, construct and test, experience failures, redesign and retest new products to eventually meet certain goals. The key for developers is to determining what the goals are and how one knows when they are met. This is accomplished by defining and deriving specific product claims that are measurable (can be tested and gauged) or are assessable (not readily measurable, but have recognizable merit) and have agreeable goals. So… for product developers all product claims should be rendered precisely such that they can be agreeably established and subsequently validated.

Why is that? Well… because many buyers of products expect (and some even demand) that the product claims be validated. In fact, some large or volume purchasers will ask for proof, or even test the product themselves to ensure, that the claims are indeed valid.

It is within this PD domain of establishing and validating product claims where two disciplines, Quality and Reliability, are widely employed and misunderstood by many of us Techies. This article will derive useful guidelines that we Techies can grasp and use to unambiguously develop the specified product.