(2009-07-14) Ries Reviews Reinertsen Flow Prod Dev

Eric Ries reviews The Principles Of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald Reinertsen ISBN:1935401009. The use of economic theory to justify decisions is a recurring theme of the book. Its goal is to help us recognize that every artifact of our product development process is really just a proxy variable. Everything: schedules, efficiency, throughput, even quality. In order to trade them off against each other, we have to convert their impact into economic terms. They are all proxies for our real goal, maximizing an economic variable like profit or revenue.Therefore, in order to maximize the true productivity (aka profitability) of our development efforts, we need to understand the relationships between these proxy variables.

Just for the economic explanations, this book would be worth the price of admission. But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from Lean Manufacturing, maneuver warfare (not FourGW), Queuing Theory, and even the architecture of computer Operating System-s and the Internet.