While traditional engineering processes crave the specificity of fully defined problems, we have carefully curated our team with an aptitude for harnessing the ambiguity of conceptual and ideation phase work into opportunity for innovation. Bringing great products to life requires engineers and designers working in concert.
Our commitment to user experience provides a constant unifying direction to our engineering efforts. Around the core customer vision, we build teams of subject matter experts to turn user experience goals into realities. We translate an emotional customer impact into engineering first-principles. These principles allow us to be highly iterative on variables that matter and highly efficient.
Meeting production commitments should not require compromising the vision
The Maestro process integrates engineering insights into the earliest phases. Our engineering focus is intertwined with Conceptual Design work to ensure vision and reality align. This pulls learning into the most initial conversations where iteration is both impactful and inexpensive rather than delaying discovery of key variables until later engineering prototypes where the lessons are more costly in dollars and time. The impact of this approach reveals itself during subsequent development builds. The more traditional engineering model reveals challenges that will extend program schedules and further study, while the Maestro process drives the convergence of technologies at the product level, refining product performance towards completion.
Experience Driven Engineering
We have codified our design and industry experience into a process and toolset that scales to the needs of any program.
Customer Experience Map
Our starting point is a holistic description of the experience we expect the product to deliver to the customer. Use Cases serve as a north-star throughout the design and development process.
First Principles
We determine the major scientific, technological, and engineering principles behind the experience to identify the key figures of merit. Through engineering modeling and testing of physical prototypes, we begin to understand the relationships among these figures of merit and establish high-level boundary conditions for the critical elements of the product system.
Conceptual Design
The boundary conditions established during the investigation of First Principles define a design space and quantitative design goals. During the Conceptual Design phase, we explore multiple options for achieving these goals. Prototype testing, finite element analysis, tolerance analysis, and hand-calculations support evaluations of figures of merit.
Product-Level Design
When the team understands the performance potential of each conceptual proposal, key stakeholders can confidently down-select and focus resources on the execution of the most promising, lowest risk design. At this point, we can merge engineering details with industrial design vision which minimizes the risk of costly down-stream design changes.
Design Optimization
During later stages of development, we use statistical methods to optimize tooling and manufacturing processes to achieve maximum system-level performance and minimize production costs.