Designing Physical Products at the Intersection of Safety, Cost, and Manufacturing Reality
Leading cross-functional engineering on global vehicle programs at Ford Motor Company
Systems Thinking · Cross-Functional Collaboration · Technical Problem Solving · Global Stakeholder Coordination · Iterative Prototyping · Engineering Design
September 2012 to May 2017
Product Development
Product Development Engineer
I designed seating and restraint system components for multiple global vehicle programs including the 2020 Ford Explorer, Lincoln Aviator, F-150 Lightning, and global Edge platform. My role sat at the intersection of design intent, engineering feasibility, and manufacturing reality — requiring constant translation across teams with different priorities, constraints, and geographies.
Project Summary
Safety requirements are non-negotiable. Manufacturing feasibility determines what is actually buildable. Cost targets shape every decision. Launch timelines wait for no one.
I spent nearly five years designing seating and restraint systems across the 2020 Ford Explorer, Lincoln Aviator, F-150 Lightning, and global Edge platform. My job was to deliver my components as part of a whole — parts that worked technically, met safety standards, hit cost targets, and could be built at scale.
None of that happens alone.
Listen
The technical problem was never the hardest part. The system around it was.
Every component decision touched safety, cost, manufacturing, and design simultaneously. And all of it had to be coordinated across engineering teams, design studios, supplier partners, and manufacturing — globally, across time zones, with every group operating on its own priorities and timeline.
The real question was never just "does this part work?" It was "does this part work within everything else that has to work too?"
Simplify
Getting the right people in early was the most reliable strategy. Late blockers in physical product development are expensive and hard to recover from.
On the Explorer front seats, that meant working with the Global Interior Design Studio — designing components that served both design intent and engineering requirements at the same time. On the Aviator captain seats, the work was safety-critical — crash requirements, precise documentation, tight coordination across engineering and testing teams in multiple geographies. On the Explorer fold-flat seats, it was hands-on and iterative — working with suppliers to prototype, test performance, and confirm production feasibility until the design could actually be built at scale.
The consistent role across all of it was translation. Between design intent and engineering reality. Between supplier capability and what manufacturing actually needed.
Solve
Delivering in this environment meant holding two things at once: the technical precision of the component in front of you and the full picture of everything it had to connect to. Safety, cost, manufacturing, design — none of those could be solved in sequence. They all had to work together.
The Explorer, Aviator, F-150 Lightning, and Edge are on the road. The components I designed are in all of them.
