How a product gets designed
No one designs the whole product. Every function designs a different version of the product. The customer only gets one.
At a third-party laboratory, I learned how claims are proven. At a system company, how products are made real. At a brand, what makes one worth building.
Engineering taught me to follow the physics. The supply chain taught me where physics stops being the whole decision.
Everyone is right, locally
Mechanical can protect the structure. Firmware can recover around it. Manufacturing can hold the process. A supplier can meet every drawing.
The product can still be wrong.
Local correctness is not product coherence.
Design happens at the interfaces
A tolerance changes tooling. Tooling changes variation. Variation changes margin. Margin changes what the customer experiences.
The hard part is seeing the chain while the product can still change.
A supplier sees a process. The system team sees an architecture. The brand sees a promise. Product design makes those views agree.
The customer inherits the compromise
Customers never see the debate. They experience weight, heat, latency, durability, price, and whether the product still works years later.
A product earns the right to exist when the compromise is coherent: it survives reality, can be built repeatedly, and creates enough value to justify its trade-offs.
Everything before that is a proposal.