The Design Stage Health Check: 9 Questions That Predict Launch Failure

I can spot a doomed project three months before the panic sets in.

After 35 years managing product launches—from automotive lighting systems at GM to complex injection molded instrument panels at Stellantis—I’ve learned that launch failures don’t happen on launch day. They happen during design, when nine critical questions go unasked or unanswered.

Here’s what keeps me up at night: I’ve watched companies pour millions into tooling, only to discover six months later that a $5,000 design review would have prevented the disaster. I’ve seen talented teams work 80-hour weeks firefighting problems that a 30-minute stakeholder conversation would have caught.

The pattern is always the same. Leadership compresses the design timeline. Best practices get shelved. Someone says “looks good enough,” and everyone moves forward. Then launch day arrives, and suddenly there’s time and money to fix everything that should have been caught in design.

We never have time to do it right, but we always find time to fix bad design.

The Nine Questions That Matter

I’ve distilled 35 years of launches—successful vertical launches and expensive learning experiences—into nine checkpoint questions. Answer these honestly during your design stage, and you’ll know whether you’re headed for a smooth launch or six months of firefighting.

 1. Are you doing benchmarking?

Before you design anything, have you studied what’s already working in the market? I’m not talking about casual observation—I mean systematic teardown and analysis of competing products or similar applications.

Benchmarking tells you what the industry has already figured out. It shows you where others have failed. It reveals design features you might not have considered. Skip this step, and you’re designing blind.

2. Do you have a design objective that defines your goals in a few clear words?

Can your entire team recite the core design objective? Not the 47-page specification document—the essential goal that guides every design decision.

If your team can’t articulate what success looks like in one or two sentences, you don’t have alignment. And without alignment, every design review becomes a battle over conflicting priorities.

 3. Are you reviewing checklists during design?

Checklists aren’t bureaucracy—they’re institutional memory. Every item on a good checklist represents an expensive lesson someone already learned.

The best teams I’ve worked with treat checklists like pilots treat pre-flight checks. Not because they’re forgetful, but because they’re professionals who know that simple oversights cause complex failures.

4. Are all stakeholders engaged?

This isn’t about inviting people to meetings. It’s about actively seeking input from everyone who will touch this product—design engineers, manufacturing engineers, quality teams, purchasing, suppliers, and yes, the people on the factory floor.

I’ve seen projects fail because no one asked the mold maker about a critical tolerance. I’ve watched launches stumble because the assembly team wasn’t consulted about part handling. Stakeholder engagement means going beyond your usual circle and asking people who might make you uncomfortable with their answers.

 5. Are lessons learned being reviewed and improved?

Every project leaves behind knowledge. The question is whether you’re capturing it, organizing it, and actually using it.

Lessons learned shouldn’t be a post-project report that gets filed and forgotten. They should be living documents that feed directly into your checklists, your design reviews, and your decision-making process. If you’re not actively reviewing lessons from similar past projects during design, you’re destined to repeat expensive mistakes.

 6. Are best practices being considered and applied?

Industry best practices exist because they work. Mold flow analysis feedback, design for manufacturing principles, robust design methods—these aren’t theoretical concepts. They’re proven approaches that prevent predictable failures.

Yet I’ve watched teams ignore mold flow analysis that clearly showed filling problems, only to face those exact problems during tool trials. I’ve seen designers bypass design for manufacturing reviews, then spend months redesigning parts that can’t be consistently produced.

Best practices feel like they slow you down during design. But they’re actually the shortcut—because following them means you skip the six-month firefighting phase after launch.

 7. Do your people have the tools required to be effective?

This goes beyond CAD software and analysis programs. Do team members have reliable communication channels? Can they easily access design standards and specifications? Do they have the authority to raise concerns and stop bad decisions?

I’ve seen brilliant engineers hamstrung by inadequate tools or blocked communication. If your team can’t effectively collaborate and access the information they need, your design process is compromised from the start.

The Two Questions Most Companies Miss

Questions 8 and 9 are where I see the most frequent failures. These are the hidden vulnerabilities that turn manageable projects into disasters.

 8. Does your team understand their true value and where they fit?

This question seems soft, almost HR-like. But it’s brutally practical.

When team members don’t understand their contribution to the larger goal, they make decisions in a vacuum. The design engineer doesn’t see how their part tolerance affects assembly efficiency. The project manager doesn’t recognize how their timeline compression forces manufacturing compromises. The quality engineer doesn’t understand how their inspection criteria impact production rates.

I’ve managed major program transitions where workers initially resisted change because they couldn’t see how their work secured the company’s future. Once they understood their role—how their efforts directly protected their jobs and grew the business—everything shifted. The same people who withheld support became the program’s strongest advocates.

This transformation doesn’t happen by accident. It requires deliberate communication about how each person’s work connects to project success. It means showing people not just what to do, but why their contribution matters and what happens if they don’t deliver.

When your team understands their true value, they stop working in silos and start working as a system.

 9. Does the team understand the value of input from secondary stakeholders?

Here’s a truth that makes some engineers uncomfortable: the maintenance worker on the factory floor often sees problems before the design engineer does.

Secondary stakeholders—millwrights, machine operators, electricians, lead hands, mold setters—work with the products and processes every single day. They see the patterns. They know which designs cause problems and which ones run smoothly. They’ve debugged more issues in a month than most design teams see in a year.

Yet most organizations treat these people as “just operators” whose input is nice but not necessary. This is catastrophically wrong.

I’ve seen projects saved by a mold setter who suggested a simple ejection modification that the engineering team had overcomplicated. I’ve watched maintenance workers identify design features that would cause chronic downtime—months before those exact problems emerged. I’ve seen operators point out assembly issues that weren’t obvious on the CAD screen but were brutally apparent when handling actual parts.

The companies that consistently launch successfully are the ones that actively seek input from secondary stakeholders during design. Not as a courtesy, but as a critical design validation step.

When you ignore secondary stakeholders, you’re designing with incomplete information. When you engage them early, you catch problems when they’re cheap to fix instead of expensive to endure.

 What This Health Check Really Tells You

Run through these nine questions honestly for your current project. If you can confidently answer yes to seven or more, you’re in good shape. Your launch won’t be perfect, but you’ve got the fundamentals covered.

If you’re scoring below seven, you’re not in design—you’re in pre-crisis. The problems haven’t surfaced yet, but they’re already locked into your design. Every question you skip or answer weakly represents risk you’re carrying forward to launch.

Pay special attention to questions 8 and 9. If your team doesn’t understand their value, and if you’re not engaging secondary stakeholders, you’re missing the institutional intelligence that prevents costly mistakes.

The Reality of Design Time

I know what you’re thinking. “We don’t have time for all this. The launch date is fixed. We need to move fast.”

I’ve heard this on every project I’ve ever managed. And I’ve learned something from watching projects succeed and fail: proper design time doesn’t slow you down. It’s the only thing that speeds you up.

Design takes twice the time you think it needs. That’s not pessimism—it’s mathematics. The time you invest in thorough design reviews, stakeholder engagement, and systematic checkpoints gets multiplied by ten when you skip it and have to fix problems after tooling is cut.

The Vertical Launch Method—the framework I’ve developed over decades of product launches—is built on this reality. Front-load the design stage with proper rigor, and your launch works from day one instead of requiring months of firefighting.

Simple design is very complicated. But simple design is successful design.

Your Next Step

Print these nine questions. Tape them to your monitor. Run through them at every design milestone for your current project.

Be honest about the gaps. The questions you can’t answer yes to aren’t failures—they’re opportunities to prevent expensive problems while they’re still cheap to fix.

And if you’re scoring poorly across multiple questions? That’s actually good news. You’ve identified the vulnerabilities before they became disasters. Now you can do something about it.

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*Having trouble getting honest yes answers to these nine questions? That’s exactly what Launchpad Project Management helps companies address. We work with manufacturing leaders to implement systematic design processes that catch problems early—when they’re still cheap to fix. Learn more about how we can help your next launch succeed from day one.*