Understanding Verification and Validation in Product Design

This is my honest attempt — based on my experience and many articles read — to shed some light on these ideas and hopefully help some product designers out there to understand what is V&V and how important it is for a product. Of course, I am helping myself too, writing and drawing cool charts is one of the best methods I have found to organize my ideas in a way that makes sense. So here we go.

First, let’s check this standard product development diagram, maybe yours is not exactly like this, but it doesn’t matter, I am just going to use it to illustrate how and where V&V happens.

And here is explained in more detail:

Before going deeper on both concepts, we need to understand that verification and Validation, even though they are commonly used together, are two different things and they are not necessarily applied following a specific order or structure, in fact, most of the time both are ongoing and overall processes happening at different points in your…