Simplify

I'm sorry to tell you that your project has failed.

Your team dreamed up something impressive in the last two design cycles. Everyone had a role, or two, or in the case of the team lead, four. There was a hardware component that involved bending metal and cutting wood, and at least three trips to Home Depot. There was an electronics component that incorporated an Arduino, three servomotors, a fish tank pump, and a Raspberry Pi. Also, there the software part, with two AI local models, a connection to ChatGPT, and your home server. The product is designed to run on iPhone, Windows and the latest Blackberry.

You're not quite sure where the failure point was.

While we haven't seen project quite that complicated (yet), more than one AT product has failed due to being extremely complex. And beyond just failure, there have been many projects that simply didn't work as well as they could have because they were too complex.

So this is a good point at which to pause consider your design, and ask yourself what you might be able to simplify.

Why simplify?

Beyond just having fewer points of failure, a simpler product also potentially offers the following advantages:

• easier production

• cheaper production

• less lead time on parts purchases

• faster iteration on the most important features

• less debugging

• less testing

• easier reproducibility

How can you simplify your design?

First, consider your product's primary objectives - the needs statements obtained from your co-designer. What does your product actually need to do to meet these needs? Keep these in mind as you conduct the following exercises.

Assignment: Constrained Brainstorming

Consider how you would meet your co-designer's needs (with something close to your current design) if you had the following constraints. Consider each one in turn (and skip any that don't apply).

• What if your product couldn't connect to the internet?

• What if your product couldn't use motors?

• What if your product couldn't use electricity?

• What if you didn't have access to one of your fabrication tools? (say, 3D printing, metalworking, soldering, etc)

• What if you could only use half the amount of one of your primary materials? (e.g. wood, plastic, PVC, metal, etc)

• What if your product had to be half its current size?

• What if you had to produce the product with half your current budget?

• Think of two more constraints that could apply to your product, and what you would have to modify to meet them.

For each constraint, how does the resulting modification affect the product? What does it to to cost, production, testing, and usability? What does it to do the product's effectiveness at solving your co-designer's problem?

Assignment: Red Teaming

Another approach to simplification is to consider the premise from the beginning of the section. Pretend that it is several weeks from now, and the CRE[AT]E Challenge is over. Your current design has failed. 

Have a team meeting about why. 

You can restrict your discussion to the product design (rather than, say, a team member getting sick, your co-designer being unavailable, or other similar issues).

Once you have your story figured out (and it doesn't need to be entirely self-consistent!), bring yourself back to the present.

Congratulations on returning to the present. Having time-traveled, you now have a list of things that went wrong in that alternate future, and a new opportunity to save your project. What do you do?

This process is called "Red Teaming." In the project management world, it's a way to imagine some of the potential failure points of your project and try to do something about them before they really impact your goal. While it does require putting on a bit of a pessimistic lens, remember that it is just an exercise, and you can prioritize changes to the timeline based on what you think is most likely and the easiest to work around.

You are not required to implement any of the modifications you came up with in the exercises above, only to think through them. However, if any of the above modifications forces a simpler product design or reduce the risk of some other issue with your product, seriously consider whether it is something that you should try.

For each design that is simpler than your current one that you do not go with, please write down the risk (if any) that you are taking on and justify why it is worth the risk.