Product reliability center

Striving for perfection, yet embracing the beauty of imperfection. That's where product reliability plays its part – balancing the mathematics of performance with the inevitability of product flaws. It's about pushing limits, learning from failures, and constantly improving. That's what we created. Remotely.

This start-up product, already in the R&D phase for two years, needed a revolutionary system architecture to carve out a new market category. The resulting design was innovative yet complex, integrating custom components, intricate firmware, and an interactive app. With no existing products in this new market territory, the product team now faced critical economic dilemmas: determining warranty lengths without incurring losses, deciding between repair or replacement strategies, and pinpointing areas for cost-effective improvements.

The project sponsor, the head of quality, suggested that I lead the project and recommended employing reliability testing to identify the product's critical points. At the project's outset, the chances of timely delivery seemed bleak. There were no available resources for the project, the budget was strict with tight control, and the first test results were expected within 3 months. And here's a twist: Reliability was unknown territory for everyone, including me!

Strategic actions were needed. First, recognizing that establishing a full test center in three months was unrealistic. We decided to increment/upgrade as the project unfolds, focusing now only on the most critical elements using off-the-shelf technology from reputable suppliers like Siemens. Second, lacking the engineers and space to construct or operate the test center, we decided to contract both. Third, we advocated for a robust data pipeline infrastructure in our budget from the start, understanding that in the critical moments, acknowledging systematic product flaws would be challenging without robust data to back it up.

We partnered with a design firm in another city, renting space in their facilities and collaborating with a talented engineer who became my first team member. We agreed that communication would be purely remote and we built our collaboration around it. I adopted a lean approach and service leadership style which made sense since I had to manage the many constraints of the project, but neither myself nor anyone else had previous experience creating such a test house. Given that we operated inside a start-up, the stakeholder engagement was challenging but crucial, reporting to multiple stakeholders in Product, Quality, Management and doing my best to keep the interest high. Within three months, we had succeeded in identifying the first product bug during the prototyping phase.

I led this project with continuous improvements for more than a year, incorporating enhancements ranging from automation and reduction of unnecessary manual labor to 24/7 data capabilities with on-demand statistical analysis. In parallel crafting the standard procedures and toolkits for transitioning the project into the company's main operations. Our project resulted in multiple firmware & safety improvements, provided the baseline for cost-down initiatives and forecasted product criticalities prior to launching in the market.

What I truly found interesting in this project is that all products, contrary to what we want to believe, are imperfect. However, there are ways to determine and manage these imperfections.