The Principles of Product Development Flow: Micro Review
Everyone needs a break from all the craziness out there right now. I distracted myself this weekend by finishing the book “The Principles of Product Development Flow” by Donald Reinertsen.
I highly recommend the book but what an endeavor !!! You will have to to persevere but you will be rewarded. The author himself calls out the density of information and how he doesn’t like putting fluff in the book. And dense it is. The book is organized around 175 principles covered in 8 chapters around the themes of product flow.
There are some absolute gems that I loved reading through — impacts of high levels of capacity utilization, perils of BUF design/plan, queues as root cause of waste, statistics of granular schedules, decentralization of control and there is more.
David draws on learnings from varying fields (manufacturing, telecom networks, army etc.) to apply to the problem of flow in product development providing great insight.
I would highly recommend it for Product Managers/Owners and any IT leader supporting product teams. My guess is I will be going back to the book for reference.
BTW, almost done with the book recommendations at the end of The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim :) It’s been very enlightening experience !!!
