I've seen it work, and I've seen it not work a lot. The key to getting it to work is to build an environment, a culture, where the product testing and feedback

I've seen it work, and I've seen it not work a lot. The key to getting it to work is to build an environment, a culture, where the product testing and feedback is baked into the process and communicated directly to the engineers and designers doing the work. It looks a lot like a race team building and operationalizing a new racing platform. The movie ford vs Ferrari captures it well. Pragmatically in what I do (design medical devices and robotics) it looks like regular "labs" where you test your prototype product in real world conditions, gather feedback, and iterate the design based on that feedback. It doesn't work when those functions are siloed. I.E. The lab people run the lab in a vacuum, write up theor findings, send them up through their management then back down through engineering management then to the individual designers. This doesn't work, it's like the game of telephone, the end is never what was initially communicated. What works is to entrench those two together. The designers doing the work attend and are part of the labs. They know first hand what to do and why. It cuts out the miscommunication and also cuts out 50% of the needless work and meetings.