Summary: Principles of Product Development Flow
I first read this most excellent book when @rnjn recommended it on Twitter five or six years ago, and it blew my mind. I started re-reading in preparation for my next project and decided to take notes for our team wiki. I tweeted some of it, but it’s not a great fit for the format, so I decided to also do a mildly sanitized public version of the doc here.

HTH.

  • I’ve tried to used markdown to make all the key points available in the index on the left margin for easy navigation
  • Your comments and questions are welcome - you’ll need to sign in to comment, though. I’m happy to do the work to incorporate interesting discussions into the notes.
  • I’ll update this doc as I work through the book, so please consider this doc to be work-in-progress.

Chapter 1: The Principles of Flow


The author is writing this book from a place of conviction that our dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong.

He lists 12 problems with the current orthodoxy:


1. Failure to Correctly Quantify Economics
2. Blindness to Queues
3. Worship of Efficiency
4. Hostility to Variabliity
5. Worship of Conformance
6. Institutionalisation of Large Batch Sizes
7. Underutilization of Cadence
8. Managing Timelines instead of Queues
9. Absence of WiP constraints
10. Inflexibility
11. Noneconomic Flow Control
12. Centalised Control

He then goes on to propose 8 mutually supportive themes to overcome the challenges with the current orthodoxy


1. Economics
2. Queues
3. Variability
4. Batch Size
5. WIP Constraints
6. Cadence, Synchronisation and Flow Control
7. Fast Feedback
8. Decentralised Control

These solutions are based on how analogous problems are solved in several fields


1. Lean Manufacturing
2. Economics
3. Queueing Theory
4. Statistics
5. The Internet
6. Computer Operating System Design
7. Control Engineering
8. Maneuver Warfare

The current orthodoxy favours naive solutions