Communication, Trust, Process: The Three Pillars Every Co-Design Team Must Get Right

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Communication, Trust, Process: The Three Pillars Every Co-Design Team Must Get Right

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What you’ll learn… (00:46) Charlene and Terrie's origin story: a teacher, a career-changer, and 45 years of PCB experience (02:29) What concurrent design actually means — and the "chasing the sun" shift model (04:10) Why communication is the foundation of co-design — and what happens when it breaks down (05:57) The trust factor: building confidence in a teammate's work to hand it straight to the customer (10:06) Where concurrent design goes south in real organizations (11:31) Version control without PLM software: the date-letter-initials convention (15:52) Partitioning a complex motherboard without enterprise software — and who holds the master (21:38) Upfront setup essentials: Gerber outputs, stackup lock-in, and avoiding the rework avalanche (27:40) Treating co-design like a scientist: test revisions and never saying "it won't work" (32:41) The CAM2 success story: world-standard connector, half the typical timeline (37:03) AI in PCB design: a tool for experienced designers — and the lesson from the taping-board era More about the episode… In this episode of the Printed Circuit Podcast, host Steph Chavez sits down with Charlene McCauley, Senior PCB Designer and owner of McCauley Design Group LLC, and Terrie Duffy, Principal Electrical Engineer of AI Automation at Dell Technologies. Charlene brings 45 years of industry experience, including server planer design at Dell and PCB instruction at Austin Community College — where Terrie was her student, worked alongside her for nine years, and now teaches the course herself. The conversation is a practical look at what concurrent and co-design require beyond the tooling: master file ownership, cross-discipline communication, and version control discipline. Real war stories — wrong revisions loaded, external teams deviating from specs — illustrate where co-design breaks down. The CAM2/DDR5 connector project anchors the episode: a world-standard achievement completed in four to five years by a small, tightly coordinated team. The episode closes on AI — not a threat to experienced designers, but a tool that rewards those willing to learn it. Connect with Steph Chavez: LinkedIn Website Connect with Charlene McCauley: LinkedIn McCauley Design Group Website Connect with Terrie Duffy: LinkedIn

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