I have a 'to re-read' list of books in OmniFocus that return to me once a year. One of the books on the list is 'The Principles of Product Development Flow'. This is a thread with a couple of my favorite quotes and ideas.
'To manage product development efficiently, we must recognize that valuable new information is constantly arriving throughout the development cycle. [...] we must learn to make good economic choices using this emerging information.'
Focus on queues rather than timelines. In short: directing your attention to where work is waiting rather than where work is being done, you'll achieve more speed.
Become better with uncertainty, instead of trying to eliminate it. 'Marines believe that they cannot remove uncertainty from warfare. [...] The side that can thrive in the presence of uncertainty is most likely to win.'
Understand Cost of Delay: in addition to the expected value we get from doing something, attaching a price to *not* doing something can improve our decision making in a big way.
'We are trying to improve our economic decisions, not to make them perfect. We want to make better economic choices than we make today, and today, this bar is set very low. We simply do not need perfect analysis.'
'Do not let fear of inaccuracy prevent you from creating economic frameworks.'
'The dark side of the Pareto principle is that we tend to focus on the high payoff 20 percent. We overmanage this 20 percent, and undermanage the other 80 percent. [...] There is usually more actual opportunity in the undermanaged 80 percent.'
'Opportunities get smaller with time, and obstacles get larger. The longer we wait, the less economic value is available. It means that we must explicitly measure, and shorten, the time it takes to make a decision.'
'Money we have already spent is a "sunk cost" and should not enter into an economic choice.' Instead: look at the remaining investment and base your decision on that.
'Queues (where our work is waiting for someone else to be picked up) have a negative psychological effect. They undermine motivation and initiative. When the next process has a 4-week queue, we feel there is little value in hurrying to finish our work.'
'Most companies fail to document failures. This can cause them to repeat the same failures. Repeating them is waste, because it generates no new information. Only new failures generate information.'
'It is usually better to improve iteration speed than defect rate.' (because by improving iteration speed, in most cases the defect rate will go down automatically because of a shorter feedback-loop)
There is a whole chapter in the book with dozens of reasons to decrease batch size (make less before you ship it). So obvious, but also super hard to actually do. Good reminder.
'Instead of killing projects, many companies mistakenly starve them for resources, barely keeping them alive. This creates the legendary zombie projects–the unliving and the undead. Zombie projects destroy flow. Kill the zombies!'
'When task duration is unknown, time-share capacity.' The idea: if you don't know how long something will block the queue, it can be good to time-slice the work. The key decision is the size of each slice.
Not a popular point, but I do agree: 'What is the simplest thing we can do to create fast feedback in a group of humans? Increase face-to-face communications.' Put the people in close proximity from each other and everything improves.
'To align behaviors, reward people for the work of others. In human systems, there are advantages to giving people credit for results that appear to be out of their control. It produces a highly supportive system. However: this is a very delicate decision that needs extra care.'
'I believe that the key to economic success is making good economic choices with the freshest possible information. When this information changes, the correct choice may also change.'
'Decentralize control over problems that age poorly. Think of it like fighting fires. We put fire extinguishers where fires are likely to break out. People do not have to request permission to put out a fire.'
'There is more value created with overall alignment than local excellence.'
'There is no substitute for moving to a quick proof-of-concept. There is no substitute for early market feedback.'
'An imperfect decision executed rapidly is far better than a perfect decision (what's that anyway) that is implemented late.'
