The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made

Chapter 8

Marketing

Engineers Can Do It Better

At the start of the previous chapter I told you, “At the end of the day, it’s all about manufacturing.” Although there is a lot of truth to that, it must be admitted that at the end of the quarter, it’s all about how many units you were able to actually sell in the past three months.

If we engineers sometimes lose sight of that bottom line, it’s perhaps because—in our minds, at least—the people in marketing inhabit the same netherworld as human resources, compliance, and legal. You only want to meet them when it is absolutely unavoidable.

During the initial weeks in my first job at the aforementioned door manufacturer in Estonia, I used to wonder why there was always a line of people sitting for hours on a bench outside the engineering office, looking like they were waiting to see a dentist. When I finally asked why, I learned that they were all sales and marketing people who were patiently waiting their turn to see the engineers. “Why are we wasting their time?” I thought. “Surely there is a better way to do this.”

That was my first experience with the bottleneck that I’ve since encountered in manufacturing enterprises around the world. Information that is critical to marketing and sales functions, and to customers, remains unnecessarily bottled up in engineering. And that is our bad.

What my sales colleagues in Estonia needed to know from the engineers was mostly whether their customers could get some small modification to the doors ...