The voice of the customer translated into the voice of the engineer.

Quality Function Deployment
In a few words: The voice of the customer translated into the voice of the engineer.

To design a product well, a design teams needs to know what it is they are designing, and what the end-users will expect from it. Quality Function Deployment is a systematic approach to design based on a close awareness of customer desires, coupled with the integration of corporate functional groups. It consists in translating customer desires (for example, the ease of writing for a pen) into design characteristics (pen ink viscosity, pressure on ball-point) for each stage of the product development (Rosenthal, 1992).
Ultimately the goal of QFD is to translate often subjective quality criteria into objective ones that can be quantified and measured and which can then be used to design and manufacture the product. It is a complimentary method for determining how and where priorities are to be assigned in product development. The intent is to employ objective procedures in increasing detail throughout the development of the product.(Reilly, 1999)

Let read it on: www.ciri.org.nz//QualityFunctionDeployment.pdf