This document provides an overview of Cotopaxi Consulting's Product Development Short Course. The course helps companies navigate the early stages of product development through teaching tools and methods to define customer needs, generate and evaluate concepts, and create prototypes. It benefits practitioners, managers, and executives across functions. Topics covered include identifying customer problems, specifying requirements, modeling solutions, and obtaining early customer feedback. The goal is to deliver competitive designs faster with less investment. The instructor, Dr. William Finch, has industry experience and teaches at universities. He aims to teach fundamental and easy-to-adopt tools to guide teams from problem definition through initial prototyping.

1. Product Development
& Engineering Problem Solving
Short Course
Version 1.0

2. About the Course
Cotopaxi Consulting’s Product Development Short Course helps companies successfully
navigate the “fuzzy front end” of product development. Whether you’re a startup or a Fortune
100 company, tools and methods covered in this course will help you deliver more competitive
designs faster, with less investment, and with less anguish.
In general, what does the Course cover?
Once it’s determined a project should move forward, the course teaches Teams how to move
forward. Course topics address engineering activities starting from the identification of
customers’ pain and definition of an opportunity, through the production of look-and-feel
prototypes and proof-of-concept prototypes. Topics covered in this course are applicable to a
wide variety of products, including tangibles, software, and services.
What’s the difference between “Product Development” and “Engineering Problem
Solving”?
While new product development drives a company’s bottom line there are always technical
challenges to be met supporting that activity, yet are somewhat removed from getting new
products “out the door”. Examples include, development of complex manufacturing systems as
well as test, or other support, equipment. In such cases, the customer is no longer the
consumer or end-user. It may be a parent company, engineering group, or even an individual
engineer. With this new focus on who is the customer, tools and methods taught in this course
can also be profitably applied to the solution of a wide range of engineering projects.
Who should attend the Course?
The course benefits practitioners, managers, and executives involved in the development of
new products. Practitioners are where the “rubber meets the road”; they will apply these tools
to their projects, providing increased value to the venture. Managers require expertise in these
tools and methods in order to be champions, mentors, and evaluators for their teams.
Executives will learn how these tools remove barriers between functions, primarily Marketing
and Engineering. PD professionals from all company functions, not only engineering, are
encouraged to attend. There may be an equation or two, but mathematics is not the focus of
this course.

3. About the Instructor
Dr. William (Yitz) Finch is the owner of Cotopaxi Consulting and
teaches easy-to-adopt, fundamental tools and methods that help PD
teams get from definition of the customer’s problem to production of
first prototypes.
For the past five years, Dr. Finch has taught Product
Design/Development and Systems Engineering courses at the Naval
Postgraduate School, CU Boulder, and Colorado School of Mines. His
experience includes teaching undergraduate students, graduate
students, professionals, and military officers. After mentoring many
student design teams, and observing their successes and struggles, he
has developed a deep understanding of the teaching and application
of product development tools and methods.
Dr. Finch has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan with an
emphasis on Product Development and Product Design. After finishing his graduate studies, he
was a Research Scientist for MIT’s Center for Innovation in Product Development (CIPD). There,
he worked on deploying academic research products to industry, helping change how the
CIPD’s partner companies develop new products. Previously, Yitz was a mechanical engineer
designing new products as well as manufacturing machinery for both GE Lighting and Ford
Motor Company.
The Early Years
Yitz was born in Simi Valley, CA in the winter of 1963, the son of an engineer and a newspaper
reporter. The Finch family soon relocated to Colorado, and young Yitz grew up building tree
houses, and eventually struggling to keep a ’72 Buick Skylark roadworthy through college. He
graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of
Colorado in Boulder. He left Colorado to work as an engineer for GE Lighting in Cleveland, Ohio
for four years, which included a 3-month-long stint in Japan. Then, heeding the call of higher
education and building more stuff, Yitz moved to Ann Arbor, MI where he completed a Ph.D. in
Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan.
In 2009, Yitz married his wonderful wife Marissa, and they were soon blessed with three
beautiful, smiling children. Among other projects, Yitz currently designs and builds custom
wood furniture for ecstatic clients at his small woodworking company in Denver, CO.

4. The Curriculum
Modules Participants will learn: Benefits
The Customer’s Problem:
“Where is your PD North Star?”
How to zero in on the real pain
(problem) your customers are
experiencing
More closely aligning your solution
with what truly relieves your
customers’ pain
Customer Needs:
“What do your customers want?”
How to precisely, unambiguously
describe your customers’ desired
product characteristics
Founding design solutions solely on
what customers want and will pay
for
Engineering Metrics:
“Does your product measure up?”
How to translate what the
customer wants into measureable
quantities
Gives the design team specific
targets to work towards
Functional Analysis:
“What does your product do?”
How to describe a product’s overall
function and sub-functions
independently from any particular
solution
Prevents premature adoption of a
particular solution
Back-of-Envelope Analyses:
“Will the product fly?”
How to use functional models to
guide early modeling efforts
Understanding of, and insight into,
the underlying physics of the
problem and the earliest
indications of product feasibility
Concept Generation &
Brainstorming:
“Hey! I’ve got a great idea!”
How to broadly explore the space
of possible solutions
Reduces the likelihood of
competitors finding a superior
design
Concept Selection:
“So, which product concept is
best?”
How to determine the relative
strengths of solution concepts
Rational, objective, defensible
method for obtaining consensus on
selecting concepts to pursue
Prototyping:
“Plug it in. Let’s see if this works.”
How to use prototypes to gain
three distinct types of customer
and product knowledge
Rapid learning about product
suitability prior to committing to a
final design
Architecting:
“How does your product go
together?”
How to specify the geometric
relationships between a product’s
sub-functions
Discovery of optimal spatial,
functional architectures prior to
committing to physical forms
Customer Interviews:
“What do your customers say?”
How to prepare, execute and
analyze effective one-on-one
customer interviews
Discovering customers’ latent (or
unexpressed), desired
characteristics for your product