![]() If you’re a small team looking for your first PD, find the most experienced one that you can. In my personal experience, book learning didn’t prepare me for the education I got in my early years doing high volume consumer electronics with a lot of responsibility. I went to graduate school and I don’t feel like I really learned how to be an engineer until I was sitting on the line figuring out how to retool a design to make it more manufacturable. What about experience required? Every PD was a new graduate once, and some of the best ones I know didn’t even study mechanical engineering. ![]() Even if you have a dedicated quality engineer - or a quality team - your PD will be in a key position to understand and drive the aspects of quality that matter for your product. If it’s applicable to your product priorities, it may also be worth mentioning that the PD will be a champion for product quality. Challenging mechanisms designs (if there are moving parts).Working with “cool materials” such as ceramics or organics.Some challenges that are considered exciting for PDs might be: You’ll also want to reference the specific challenges your product requirements will have in order to attract candidates who are excited about the challenges you are solving (and hopefully have some relevant experience). Creating robust designs that balance performance, manufacturability, and cost.Understanding and defining the product requirements.Owning the end-to-end mechanical design.Most PDs will oversee the following, which you’ll want to make sure you cover in your job description: Luckily, many experienced PDs have had broad exposure to the hardware development process, and can usually cover these other roles too, as long as the product design isn’t too complex. In small teams, this is an especially tricky hire because the PD is never “just a PD” – they are often a combination of PD, quality engineer, and engineering program manager (EPM) who will own all the parts of the hardware process. As a former Product Design Engineer, I’m often asked for advice on how to hire Product Designers (PDs) or mechanical engineers (MEs).
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