Quotes from Donald G. Reinertsen

Batch size is a tremendously useful tool for reducing queues.

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.

Feedback is several orders of magnitude more important in product development than it is in manufacturing.

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

Anyone can be captain in a calm sea.

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.

why American industry adopted lean manufacturing 30 to 40 years after these methods began to produce benefits in Japan? Was it because the Japanese hid this approach from Western eyes? No. American industry waited until the full-scale implementations of these ideas at Toyota could no longer be ignored.

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.

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.

We live in an uncertain world. We must recognize that our original plan was based on noisy data, viewed from a long time-horizon.

Cadence causes events to happen at regular time intervals. Synchronization causes multiple events to happen at the same time.

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.

Reducing batch size reduces variability, and with lower variability, we may find our existing capacity is already sufficient.

Product development produces the recipes for products, not the products themselves.