Review: Managing The Design Factory

Title: Managing the Design Factory
Author: Donald Reinertsen
Length: 288 pages
Published: 1997
ISBN-10: 0684839911
ISBN-13: 9780684839912

This book analyzes product development processes from a lean perspective. The
author starts by introducing the concept of a “design factory”, which shows the
differences between lean principles applied to manufacturing and lean principles
applied to creating new innovations. The key differences include information
arrival processes and the repeatable versus non-repeatable.

One key takeaway from reading this book is that the goal of creating new things
is not to reduce the variability of creating them. Having waste is actually
often the most effective way to create something new because the “waste”
generates information, which has value. If you are doing something that has a
known problem statement and a known solution, you are essentially turning the
design crank. Seek to increase throughput and increase flow before eliminating
waste.

Much like Goldratt’s book, The Goal, Reinertsen focuses on viewing the company
profitability as the lens to view business decisions through. He advocates
modeling of projects and their intended ROI, preferring simple and useful models
over opaque ones. He discusses many subjects from the perspective of how to
optimize for development expense, unit costs, performance, or speed of
development, which are mostly at odds with each other.

He has an interesting explication of queueing and information theory, and how
these impact product development. One takeaway from the information theory
topic is that information is inversely proportionate to the probability of an
event occurring. This coincides with my views on generating models (similar to
Popper’s views on the subject.) Essentially, tests should be written to have
the maximum value if they fail. I believe Reinertsen would be a proponent of
high level tests. He also contends that if your tests would cause a
competitor’s product to fail, you are likely testing too much.

Overall, I found this book to be a compelling read with insights clearly stated
and a strong overall theme.

Full outline