Home > Work > The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
1 " The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became "
― , The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
2 " We should not prioritize on the basis of project profitability, but rather on how this profitability is affected by delay. "
3 " In our factories, we create flexibility by paying more to workers who can work at more stations on a production line. We value flexibility, and we pay for it. In contrast, most product development organizations exclusively reward specialization. "
4 " In product development, our greatest waste is not unproductive engineers, but work products sitting idle in process queues. "
5 " Reducing risk, which is the primary mission of testing, clearly creates economic value for product developers. In fact, reducing risk is so centrally important to product development that it is indispensable for us to quantify its economic impact. "
6 " If we have drifted 10 heads above the zero line in our coin flip experiment, what is the probability of getting 10 tails in a row to return us to zero? About 1 in 1,000. "
7 " If you are going to worry about it, I won’t. "
8 " Since high capacity utilization simultaneously raises efficiency and increases delay cost, we need to look at the combined impact of these two factors. We can only do so if we express both factors in the same unit of measure, life-cycle profits. If we do this, we will always conclude that operating a product development process near full utilization is an economic disaster. "
9 " without variability, we cannot innovate. Product development produces the recipes for products, not the products themselves. If a design does not change, there can be no value-added. But, when we change a design, we introduce uncertainty and variability in outcomes. We cannot eliminate all variability without eliminating all value-added. "
10 " To manage product development effectively, we must recognize that valuable new information is constantly arriving throughout the development cycle. Rather than remaining frozen in time, locked to our original plan, we must learn to make good economic choices using this emerging information. "
11 " if we incentivize conformance, people will insert contingency reserves to prevent their tasks from missing the schedule. The more granular the schedule, the larger the schedule reserves. And these reserves aggregate into even longer timelines. The more we increase planning detail and the harder we try to incentivize performance, the worse our problem becomes. "
12 " when product developers choose to operate their processes at high levels of utilization, they create unnecessary and wasteful variability in their processes. It is important to realize that this variability is a self-inflicted wound. "
13 " agility: the ability to quickly change direction while traveling at a high speed. "
14 " Face-to-face communication is inherently real-time and combines both verbal and nonverbal information. "
15 " Batch size is a tremendously useful tool for reducing queues. "
16 " The value added by an activity is the difference in the price that an economically rational buyer would pay for a work product before, and after, the activity is performed. The customer is one judge of economic value, but never the sole judge. "
17 " Feedback is several orders of magnitude more important in product development than it is in manufacturing. "
18 " I believe that the dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong. Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core. It is as wrong as we were in manufacturing, before the Japanese unlocked the secret of lean manufacturing. I believe that a new paradigm is emerging, one that challenges the current orthodoxy of product development. I want to help accelerate the adoption of this new approach "
19 " Anyone can be captain in a calm sea. "
20 " reducing batch size before adding capacity at bottlenecks. Batch size reduction is cheaper than adding capacity, it is easy to sell to top management, and it massively reduces queues. "