Slippyfish,
Those are some great ideas! Through the years I’ve developed a really good workflow between some of the more “conceptual” thinking engineers and I, and you are completely right, spending two days sitting around a desk toss sketches back and forth is a great asset to the project. I like your idea about taking the new ideas that might pop up during a development phase, and realizing when they’re out of scope, and breaking them off into their own projects.
Pier,
Maybe “hand off” was the wrong wording, think of three people sitting at a table, one the project lead, and the others are support, I was mostly saying at some point I would switch seats from the project lead, to a support role (never leaving the table though.)
Did you find that marketing needed some amount of training as to know what type of information you needed to start on a project? If so, how deep do you think they would go ideally into research? (like a macro vs. micro thing)
Thanks guys for your comments and advice!
The hardest part I still need to figure out is how to make space for there to be some kind of random exploration. At the end of the day my department is made up of very few resources: vp, director, manager, three engineers, and myself…