Project to Product Quotes

“Lesson One: To avoid the pitfalls of local optimization, focus on the end-to-end value stream.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Rather than making generalized assumptions about what WIP limits should be for each value stream, the Value Stream Network provides the data to determine and tune flow load over time. At Tasktop, we have witnessed this effect by putting too many features that crosscut our architecture on the Hub team. While all of those large and crosscutting features were deemed critical by the business at the time, doing more than one of them in parallel across the teams within that value stream resulted in a lower flow velocity over the course of a year than the flow velocity of taking on one crosscutting feature at a time.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Resist Proxies As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2. A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Organizations that manage IT delivery as projects instead of products are using managerial principles from two ages ago and cannot expect those approaches to be adequate for succeeding in this one. Visionary organizations are creating and managing their Value Stream Networks and product portfolios in order to leapfrog their competition in the Age of Software”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.22 The economist Carlota Perez has expanded on these concepts in her profound book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.23”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Once again, the proxy variables of “number of people trained on the Agile process” or “deploys per day” will only be meaningful if training or deployment are the bottleneck. But when the business is disconnected from IT, the Agile teams and DevOps pipeline never get the opportunity to become the bottleneck.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“the proliferation of repositories and tools, and the lack of an entire infrastructure layer at these organizations led me to my second epiphany—the realization that disconnected software value streams are the number-one bottleneck to software productivity at scale. These disconnects span all software specialists, from business stakeholders to support staff. They are the result of a misalignment between the end-to-end delivery architecture and the project management model with the product-oriented software value streams.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Trying to slow progress or demand is foolhardy; but leaving the economy to a handful of digital monopolies will be problematic for our companies, our staff, and our social systems. If we do not turn this tide—the increasing amount of wealth in the hands of tech giants, and the network effects of technologies making effective government regulation difficult at best—the consequences could be more dire than the mass company extinctions that we witnessed in the four previous ages.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Over 12,000 suppliers, over 30,000 parts in each car,”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“software architecture, you have extensibility,” says Rene. “Maybe it is hard to see, but this plant is also architected for extensibility along its main production lines.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“The Central Building looks like a CPU and its interconnects.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“The term scenius (coined by musician Brian Eno) describes great works that are created from a community of motivated and mutually appreciative individuals;”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“Specialization allows us to handle ever-growing complexity, but the benefits of specialization can only be fully realized if the silos that it creates can be connected effectively. Some of those silos rely on human collaboration and interaction, as is the topic of General McChrystal’s book. But others require an infrastructure and cross-silo integration to give those same people and teams a chance to collaborate and exchange the highly complex knowledge that they process in their daily work.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework

“As mouse clicks became my limiting factor, I started tracking the events for each click by instrumenting my operating system, and I came to realize that the majority of my RSI-causing activity was not producing value; it was just clicking between windows and applications to find and refind the information I needed to get work done.”
― Mik Kersten, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework