Why independent scrutiny matters
A design team that has lived with a problem for months is the worst-placed group to spot what they've missed — not through carelessness, but because familiarity makes assumptions invisible. A design review works because someone who wasn't in the room for every earlier decision asks the question everyone else stopped asking: does this actually meet the requirement, or does it just look like it does?
What it looks like in practice
We chair or contribute to formal design reviews at defined stages of a programme, check design outputs directly against requirements rather than against intent, and raise findings clearly enough that they get actioned rather than filed. The goal isn't to find fault for its own sake — it's to catch the expensive mistakes while they're still cheap to fix, on paper, before they're built into hardware or code.