Savvy Avi

Are you familiar with the project constraint triangle? Budget, time, scope? Improving in one aspect often comes at the expense of the other two. Or, as some put it, pick any two because projects seldom finish on time, on budget, and at scope. The project constraints measure the quality of the process of building an end product. I have learned that there is a similar triangle for product constraints. Constraints that measure the quality of the product itself:  ease of use ,  effectiveness  and  maintainability . Read more in Jumptap's Tech Blog  where I originally published this post.  

As engineers, many of us at some point contemplate founding a start up. For most, it is nothing more than a thought and for a sound reason – we know the start up success rate. However, if you are anything like me a dormant entrepreneurial seed lingers in the back of your brain. Product Design and Development, a foundation course in MIT’s System Design and Development program, encourages experiments in that direction. The course reviews the product development process starting with deriving user needs and on to designing a concept and prototype. Interesting guest lecturers come to speak to class such as industrial designer Matt Kressy who talked about rapid prototyping and Yoav Shapira a startup VP who talked about agile development. Class teaching is followed by a semester long project to come up with a new product. Each group receives $800 to create a prototype. At the end of the course there is a competition and the winners receive a small budget to continue with the product devel...