Improving Project Visibility in Complex PCB Design Projects

In our first article, we explored how Jira, originally designed for software, can be customized for hardware teams facing physical constraints, long lead times, and cross-discipline dependencies. 

The next article builds on this foundation and shows how to anchor project management with Vision Briefs, On-Ramps, and execution cycles. 

In this article, we’ll focus on a practical challenge for electronics teams: improving visibility and traceability in complex PCB projects.

• New to agile hardware development? Download our primer whitepaper “Modified Agile for Electronics Development - A Smarter Path to High-Value Solutions”!

The Visibility Challenge in PCB Projects

Unlike software, where progress in the form of new features can flow linearly with demonstrated features added, tested, and released incrementally, PCB projects require a much more integrated, holistic approach. This means that progress and decisions are often hidden behind technical complexity, layers of dependencies, and a myriad of tools. With so many moving parts, visibility and traceability are fragile. Left unmanaged, misalignments lead to repeated board spins, frustrated teams, costly delays in the lab, or massive expenses in the field. 

The key is to enable visibility and traceability from the beginning, so potential issues are identified early, and known issues are tracked through to resolution.

Agile methods, adapted for hardware development and supported by tools such as Jira for project management, along with modern electronics design and development solutions like Altium, can provide transparency, alignment, and progress reporting required to optimize efficiency and minimize risk.

Based on years of applying the MAHD Framework to electronics projects, we’ve identified five essential criteria for great visibility and traceability. These criteria provide a structured lens to assess whether your dashboards, reports, and conversations are truly enabling progress or simply generating noise.

1. Clear Goals and Guardrails

Project goals, constraints, and market/customer priorities must be prioritized, communicated, and reinforced from the beginning and throughout the project. Everyone needs to know the why, the non-negotiables, and the measures of success. Without this alignment, teams risk chasing conflicting objectives or optimizing locally instead of for the customer.

Example - for our premium fitness tracker PCB project:

• Goals: Deliver market-leading battery life and health analytics accuracy.
• Constraints: Deliver by Q3, 2027, pass FCC RF compliance; enclosure size <42mm.
• Market/customer priority: Market-leading health analytics, accuracy, best-in-class battery life, and comfort for athletes and serious health watchers.

This clarity ensures that when tradeoffs arise (e.g., performance vs. battery life vs. schedule), the team uses shared priorities rather than shifting opinions.

How Enabling Tools Support This Criterion

2. Critical Questions Asked and Answered Consistently

Visibility starts with knowing which questions really matter and ensuring the team has a path to answering them for optimal results. Traceability means that once decisions are made, this path can be retraced quickly to understand why and how they were made. 

The strategic reporting is not the typical status trivia, but progress on program-shaping questions, such as:

• Which strategic questions do we need to answer? When? Why? How? Who? 
• Are we ready for EVT?
• Which risks are still trending upward?
• What must we learn from customers?
• Where is not-invented-here limiting our ability to innovate?
• What is the likely intention of our key competitors?
• Where are we blocked: ECAD, layout, lab, or supply?
• What did we learn in the last demo, and what decision did it drive?

For our fitness tracker, critical questions may be:

• What does marketing-leading” health analytics” really mean? “Accuracy”? “Best in class”? How do these translate into specific electrical functions
• Does the team have the skills, plan, and resources necessary to deliver on this promise?

If the project methods and tools can’t answer this clearly and with evidence, visibility has failed.

How Enabling Tools Support This Criterion

3. Dependencies Exposed and Managed

PCB projects often fail because dependencies remain hidden until too late: a part shortage stalls layout, or firmware lags behind schematic changes. Great visibility means every dependency - within the project and external - is visible, tracked, and actively managed.

For the fitness tracker, battery size, technology, and form factor directly impact performance, final design, and possible features. By making this dependency explicit, teams avoid surprises when boards arrive late or unusable.

How Enabling Tools Support This Criterion

4. Evidence-Based Decision-Making

In complex PCB programs, decisions often hinge on incomplete data, or worse, on the loudest or most senior opinion. Visibility only works if issues, risks, and tradeoffs are surfaced openly and supported with reasonable evidence in a workflow management or project management platform.

For the fitness tracker, linking test results and customer feedback to both outcomes and technical attributes lets the team see the current state and trace decisions back to early discussions. The choice to adopt a larger battery cell (with its form-factor impact and customer comfort testing plan) would be clear and visible. And because the evidence was tied to the IPAC Iteration goal and project success factors, the decision must be transparent and traceable.

How Enabling Tools Support This Criterion

5. Authentic Progress Reporting

Progress must be real, relevant, timely, enabling, and open. 

• Real means tied to evidence (prototype validated, risk retired), not paper progress.
• Relevant means tied to outcomes, not just task completion. 
• Timely means aligned with demo cadence, not buried in monthly decks. 
• Enabling means dashboards inform decisions rather than create overhead.

For the fitness tracker, reporting progress as 'PCB layout 90% complete' adds little value. Reporting 'Proto-A boards built”, “Battery tested on ‘these’ conditions with  ±5% accuracy” is authentic progress.

How Enabling Tools Support This Criterion

Conclusion & Next Steps

Visibility and traceability in complex PCB programs are defined by concrete criteria that teams can align around. We’ve highlighted five essential criteria: clear goals and guardrails, critical questions answered, dependencies managed, evidence-based decision-making, and authentic progress reporting. Together, these create a practical framework for improving visibility and avoiding costly surprises.

Our experience shows that while these criteria work well across many programs, the act of aligning as a team or organization around your own definition of visibility is just as valuable. Building consensus on what matters ensures that dashboards, reports, and reviews support progress rather than hinder it.

For more details on agile-for-hardware methods, download our whitepaper “Modified Agile for Electronics Development - A Smarter Path to High-Value Solutions”.