Dr. Allen Ward, as documented in his book Lean Product and Process Development, asserted that the output of product development should not be thought of as a product design, nor even as the product as-delivered to the customer. Rather, the output of product development is an operational value stream capable of consuming parts from suppliers, building them into the designed product, and then delivering that product to the customer, and supporting that product at the customer.
Further, Allen observed that we don't do that just once. We design, develop, and deliver one product after another. So, if we're doing that right, we should really be thinking of product development as the development of knowledge about how operational value streams best satisfy their customers, and then out of that knowledge should emerge products on a regular cadence. That is Lean Product Development.
Manufacturing (and Operations, in general) has been applying Lean techniques to Continuously Improve its performance, achieving higher quality and lower cost. The improvements have been substantial. However, we know that a significant amount of the back-end costs and delivered quality are dictated by decisions made in product development, and cannot be improved without changing the designs coming out of product development. In fact, some have measured as much as 85% of the Product Lifecycle Costs are dictated by decisions made in the earliest phases of product development.
Said another way, less than 50% of the potential improvement can be achieved through continuous improvement activities solely within Operations. The other 50% will require involvement from product development. The learning from Operations needs to flow into product development... in fact, it needs to flow into the very front end of product development, since that's where many of the critical decisions are made.
Over the years, there have been many "Design for X" efforts to try to tap into this potential for improvement. However, much of that potential remains untapped because of the fuzzy decision-making described in The Challenges page of this website. Thus, one of the big benefits of The Solution, Set-Based Thinking™, is that it establishes an effective way to flow visual knowledge from Operations to the front end of product development in such a way that it can efficiently impact the improved set-based decision-making that has been put in place there... and that can double the continuous improvement that is possible!