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The aerospace industry constantly seeks to optimize its product development processes to stay competitive in the market. Design for Excellence (DFX) with its various technological areas, tools and methods play an essential role to allow meeting customer expectations while respecting organizational capabilities. However, the quantity and diversity of DFX technological areas and methods make sometimes difficult for the companies to address the appropriate ones for each project. Success in DFX application, keeping product development within scope, time, cost, and quality while not overloading it by applying, monitoring, and managing too many areas, is sometimes very context-dependent, being influenced by the experience of the engineering team as well as the kind of project portfolio or project phase. Considering this scenario, the motivation of this work is to perform a mapping of the technological areas of the DFX, given the decision-making problem of selecting the most appropriate for each kind of project. The objective is to evaluate, according to the point of view of the engineering team, if it is possible to define a general approach to guide, at least initially, project managers in selecting the main technological areas of the DFX, given a typical aerospace organization project portfolio as the boundary condition, and considering special characteristics in each phase of a project lifecycle. Departing from the literature review of the main technological areas of DFX used in the aerospace domain, the research is performed by means of a survey with senior product development engineers from a real aerospace company. Then, quantitative results are gathered through the Likert scale, which allows to draw a hierarchization analysis based on the multicriteria Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). A method to indicate the initial choice for the DFX area is presented, which is deemed to be suitable to help project managers and engineers during design of complex products.