The Principles of Product Development Flow Quotes

“In product development, our greatest waste is not unproductive engineers, but work products sitting idle in process queues.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“If you are going to worry about it, I won’t.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Cadence is the use of a regular, predictable rhythm within a process. This rhythm transforms unpredictable events into predictable events. It plays an important role in preventing variability from accumulating in a sequential process.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“We should not prioritize on the basis of project profitability, but rather on how this profitability is affected by delay.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“The coefficient of variation is a measure of variability that is computed as the ratio between the standard deviation and the mean of a probability distribution. You can think of it as a general measure of the relative breadth of a probability distribution. Since the square of the standard deviation is the variance of a distribution, this means that queues vary linearly with variance, a point worth remembering.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“decentralized control is not simply a philosophy; it is a set of technical skills that can be developed and practiced.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Decentralized control is based on trust. This trust must be present both hierarchically and laterally. Subordinates must trust their superiors, and superiors must trust their subordinates.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Feedback is several orders of magnitude more important in product development than it is in manufacturing.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Face-to-face communication is inherently real-time and combines both verbal and nonverbal information.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“agility: the ability to quickly change direction while traveling at a high speed.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“companies often create complex prioritization algorithms that produce precise priorities based on very imprecise input data.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Cadence causes events to happen at regular time intervals. Synchronization causes multiple events to happen at the same time.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Anyone can be captain in a calm sea.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“One of the biggest advantages of these three demand-focused approaches, demand blocking, WIP purging, and flexible requirements, is the speed with which they can be executed.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Batch size is a tremendously useful tool for reducing queues.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“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.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Reducing batch size reduces variability, and with lower variability, we may find our existing capacity is already sufficient.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“When a software development process moves to daily test cycles, we gain the benefits of smaller changes, fewer open bugs, faster feedback, and faster cycle time.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development