PD Course Description & Curriculum
- 1. Product Development & Engineering Problem Solving Short Course Version 1.0
- 2. About the Course Cotopaxi Consulting’s Product Development Short Course helps companies successfully navigate the “fuzzy front end” of product development. Whether you’re a startup or a Fortune 100 company, tools and methods covered in this course will help you deliver more competitive designs faster, with less investment, and with less anguish. In general, what does the Course cover? Once it’s determined a project should move forward, the course teaches Teams how to move forward. Course topics address engineering activities starting from the identification of customers’ pain and definition of an opportunity, through the production of look-and-feel prototypes and proof-of-concept prototypes. Topics covered in this course are applicable to a wide variety of products, including tangibles, software, and services. What’s the difference between “Product Development” and “Engineering Problem Solving”? While new product development drives a company’s bottom line there are always technical challenges to be met supporting that activity, yet are somewhat removed from getting new products “out the door”. Examples include, development of complex manufacturing systems as well as test, or other support, equipment. In such cases, the customer is no longer the consumer or end-user. It may be a parent company, engineering group, or even an individual engineer. With this new focus on who is the customer, tools and methods taught in this course can also be profitably applied to the solution of a wide range of engineering projects. Who should attend the Course? The course benefits practitioners, managers, and executives involved in the development of new products. Practitioners are where the “rubber meets the road”; they will apply these tools to their projects, providing increased value to the venture. Managers require expertise in these tools and methods in order to be champions, mentors, and evaluators for their teams. Executives will learn how these tools remove barriers between functions, primarily Marketing and Engineering. PD professionals from all company functions, not only engineering, are encouraged to attend. There may be an equation or two, but mathematics is not the focus of this course.
- 3. About the Instructor Dr. William (Yitz) Finch is the owner of Cotopaxi Consulting and teaches easy-to-adopt, fundamental tools and methods that help PD teams get from definition of the customer’s problem to production of first prototypes. For the past five years, Dr. Finch has taught Product Design/Development and Systems Engineering courses at the Naval Postgraduate School, CU Boulder, and Colorado School of Mines. His experience includes teaching undergraduate students, graduate students, professionals, and military officers. After mentoring many student design teams, and observing their successes and struggles, he has developed a deep understanding of the teaching and application of product development tools and methods. Dr. Finch has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan with an emphasis on Product Development and Product Design. After finishing his graduate studies, he was a Research Scientist for MIT’s Center for Innovation in Product Development (CIPD). There, he worked on deploying academic research products to industry, helping change how the CIPD’s partner companies develop new products. Previously, Yitz was a mechanical engineer designing new products as well as manufacturing machinery for both GE Lighting and Ford Motor Company. The Early Years Yitz was born in Simi Valley, CA in the winter of 1963, the son of an engineer and a newspaper reporter. The Finch family soon relocated to Colorado, and young Yitz grew up building tree houses, and eventually struggling to keep a ’72 Buick Skylark roadworthy through college. He graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado in Boulder. He left Colorado to work as an engineer for GE Lighting in Cleveland, Ohio for four years, which included a 3-month-long stint in Japan. Then, heeding the call of higher education and building more stuff, Yitz moved to Ann Arbor, MI where he completed a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. In 2009, Yitz married his wonderful wife Marissa, and they were soon blessed with three beautiful, smiling children. Among other projects, Yitz currently designs and builds custom wood furniture for ecstatic clients at his small woodworking company in Denver, CO.
- 4. The Curriculum Modules Participants will learn: Benefits The Customer’s Problem: “Where is your PD North Star?” How to zero in on the real pain (problem) your customers are experiencing More closely aligning your solution with what truly relieves your customers’ pain Customer Needs: “What do your customers want?” How to precisely, unambiguously describe your customers’ desired product characteristics Founding design solutions solely on what customers want and will pay for Engineering Metrics: “Does your product measure up?” How to translate what the customer wants into measureable quantities Gives the design team specific targets to work towards Functional Analysis: “What does your product do?” How to describe a product’s overall function and sub-functions independently from any particular solution Prevents premature adoption of a particular solution Back-of-Envelope Analyses: “Will the product fly?” How to use functional models to guide early modeling efforts Understanding of, and insight into, the underlying physics of the problem and the earliest indications of product feasibility Concept Generation & Brainstorming: “Hey! I’ve got a great idea!” How to broadly explore the space of possible solutions Reduces the likelihood of competitors finding a superior design Concept Selection: “So, which product concept is best?” How to determine the relative strengths of solution concepts Rational, objective, defensible method for obtaining consensus on selecting concepts to pursue Prototyping: “Plug it in. Let’s see if this works.” How to use prototypes to gain three distinct types of customer and product knowledge Rapid learning about product suitability prior to committing to a final design Architecting: “How does your product go together?” How to specify the geometric relationships between a product’s sub-functions Discovery of optimal spatial, functional architectures prior to committing to physical forms Customer Interviews: “What do your customers say?” How to prepare, execute and analyze effective one-on-one customer interviews Discovering customers’ latent (or unexpressed), desired characteristics for your product