The Role of Experimental Design Approach in Decision Gates During New Product Development

Experimental Design Technique (EDT) in combination with stage gate strategy is a powerful tool for providing critical information to designers during New Product Development (NPD) as well as product redesign activities. It systematically evaluates new product design strategy and facilitates redesign of existing products. The benefit of applying this technique to NPD is to speed up the development process by allowing product design team to make more informed decisions based on the generated experimental design data. The risk that designers face every time when they take decisions at every stage of NPD is high. Going with right decisions and refusing the wrong ones should be the driving force throughout product development process. To understand the decision making challenges of a designer, this paper illustrates go-no-go decisions in a sample of graduate students who attempted to design a “green stool” as part of their class assignment. Factors common to and factors exclusive to the various design stages are analyzed and described using EDT. Although this integrated “experimental design go-no-go approach” was not used initially by the design students, our analysis on the process is done post factor.