The aerospace industry constantly seeks to optimize its product development processes to remain competitive in the market. The Design for Excellence (DFX) methodology, with its diverse technological areas, tools and methods, plays an essential role in meeting customer expectations while respecting organizational capabilities. However, the number and diversity of DFX technological areas and methods make it sometimes difficult for companies to use the most appropriate technological areas for each project. Success in applying DFX, keeping product development within scope, time, cost and quality, without overburdening it with the application, monitoring and management of many areas, is sometimes very context dependent, being influenced by the team's experience of engineering as well as the type of project portfolio or project phase. Considering this scenario, the motivation of this work is to map the technological areas of DFX and assist companies in making decisions to select the most appropriate areas for each type of project. The objective of the research is to evaluate, from the engineering team's point of view, whether it is possible to define a general approach to guide, at least initially, project managers in the selection of the main technological areas of DFX, given a typical project portfolio of an aerospace organization as a boundary condition, and considering special characteristics in each phase of a project's life cycle. Starting from a literature review of the main DFX technological areas used in the aerospace domain, this work is carried out through a survey of senior product development engineers from a real aerospace company. Then, the quantitative results are collected and categorized on the Likert scale, which allows a hierarchical analysis based on the multi-criteria hierarchical analysis (AHP) process to be carried out. A method to indicate the initial choice for the DFX area is detailed and verified and was considered suitable by research participants to assist project managers and engineers during the design of complex products.