Customer Reviews

Managing the Design Factory

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I bought this and about five other books on product development. Without question, this was the best.

Reinertsen has an effective writing style that is engaging and informative. His examples are relevant and illustrative; even when not immediately on point with my business, they helped me to understand a concept.

The book builds on some fairly simple - but enormously powerful - tools including basic financial modeling and queuing theory. Reinertsen explains why the tools are relevant and how to employ them across a spectrum of businesses. He then uses the tools to substantiate some remarkable product development concepts that he presents later in the book.

The book is - thankfully - devoid of pithy phrases and buzz words. It teaches methods and ways of thinking. It doesn't profess answers, but it has driven an enormous amount of our product planning and product development efforts.

I haven't found a better book on the subject.

Over years of working to improve the process of new product development in organizations with which I have been associated, I have read many books on new product development and reducing cycle time of new product development. I regularly am also asked about these topics in college and executive courses I teach. There is no single book that completely covers these topics. However, if you only have time to read one book, I think Reinertsen's book is the one to start with. It is a real eye opener. Many profound(!) and extraordinarily productive concepts and methods are presented in a reasonably sized, easy to understand volume. You won't go wrong in buying it.

If you're looking for a book to arm you with the latest buzzwords and easy answers, this is not for you. If you're looking for a useful framework for thinking about product design and tools for applying principles, this is an excellent buy. This book is clearly written, well-organized, and full of useful information.

Unlike many management books, it's not 20 pages of information stretched out to 200 pages in order to make a book. Also, unlike most product development books, this book is of great value not just to product managers and designers, but would be a great read for financial managers and marketing managers. A manufacturing manager reading this book will smile with satisfaction at seeing common modern manufacturing principles well applied to the design realm.

The only weak points I can think of are: 1) That it may be useful for the author to break out case studies rather than keeping them in the same typeface intermingled with the rest of the text. 2) No real advice is given on how to overcome real-world resistance to these ideas. Some sage advice on how to introduce these concepts and tools into organizations with existing biases and cultures could be a real benefit to practitioners. These are minor objections though.

Whether you're in a software start-up or part of a Fortune 500 company design team doing existing product improvement, this book contains useful information that will enhance your understanding of what you're doing right and what you could do better - and WHY!

Managing the Design Factory; A Product Developer's Toolbox, by Donald G. Reinertsen, is an important book on how successful companies should develop new products. Many popular management books share some common themes such as; JIT, kanban, lean manufacturing, reducing WIP, quick turn times, low inventory. Unfortunately, the development process in most companies has been slow to apply these insights to their engineering and design practice. Reinertsen does a superb job of showing how this is done. The Design Factory exists for one purpose - the same as the manufacturing factory - to make a profit. The focus of the book is on tools, not rules and rituals. These are practical tools that account for varied situations. The information is presented in a form that an engineer can understand and appreciate, but without unnecessary difficulty. There are excellent sections on queue and information theory, and capacity utilization and batch size, and on eliminating useless controls. I agree completely with the `do it, try it, fix it' approach to development, and not being burdened with trying to make it right the first time. Every practicing design engineer should read this book.

I have never seen so much good advice about product development in one place. Applying concepts from manufacturing, finance, queuing theory and communications theory, Reinertsen proposes many ways in which we can design better processes for development.

For example, if we were to view the investment in design work as a depreciating asset, like work-in-process inventory in the factory, we would be able to make better decisions about time, manpower, and project delay tradeoffs.

Key concepts include: valuing design work based on its financial impact on the organization; learning as much as possible as early as possible in the development cycle; managing queues in the development process; creating specifications which are flexible for as long as possible, so that evolving customer requirements can be accommodated.

He clearly shows that we can optimize development work on only one of the following parameters: Product cost, product performance, speed of development, development expense. The approach for each one is different, and it is important to be clear which one is primary.

There is a wealth of useful and practical advice in this book. For example, here are some comments on testing:

"Too often testing is viewed as a necessary evil in the development process. It only exists because we make mistakes. If we made fewer mistakes, we would not need to do all this testing. We should spend our money on `designing in quality' instead of finding defects by testing. The result of such an attitude may be a test department that is under-resourced and under-managed. Unfortunately, by viewing testing as a problem, rather than an asset, we miss the opportunity to capitalize on the extraordinary improvements that can take place in product testing.
"Let us start by putting testing in perspective. The elapsed schedule time for product testing is typically 30 to 60 percent of overall development cycle length. This is not another minor activity, it is a major design activity. ... text results have inherently high information content. In fact, testing is usually the stage of design process that generates the greatest amount of information.... ...Most companies misunderstand the role of testing ... because they fail to distinguish between design testing and manufacturing testing. ... Manufacturing testing is done to identify defects in the manufacturing process. ... Design testing is done to generate information about the design. A good outcome is high information generation early in the design process. ... We want a failure rate close to 50 percent...." [pp 230-232]

I highly recommend this book to senior managers in product development, and their Marketing and Finance counterparts.

Reviewed by John Levy,
...

Good broad coverage of many aspects of product management. Clear language; priciples are explained well. There is much that can be applied very practically. At times a little too theoretical, but overall very helpful.

Reinertsen's book is a hands-on method for improving product devlopment decision making. Based on the business case for the product under development (new product revenue, profit, timing) managers and engineers learn to make real time decisions that are aligned with the business goals. For example, as a product development manager in the IC business, should I invest in additional IC layout personnel to get my chip out 3 months sooner. Allows you to logically analyze the decison and then document and explain to management your thought process for adding resources of a particular type (or not).

First book I've seen that applies the power of the JIT/kanban philosophy to the R&D process. Focus is on reduced WIP (projects), measuring queues, eliminating bottlenecks, etc. in the devlopment environment. Something you can actually use to improve upon your execution. Very insightful.

If you are responsible for bringing new products to market and want a framework for analyzing your real life problems and alternatives for solving them, this book is for you.

I don't think they use the word agility once, but this book clearly enunciates all of the reasons that agile processes often show success, without prescribing a specific set of items to do. This book will enable managers of development teams to look at the product they're building, its impact on the business's bottom line, and make both long-term and daily decisions about how to run their team. Individual developers will also gain an understanding of how to better streamline processes -- for instance, people often think that introducing large processes to "prevent an error from happening again" is a good idea. However, this book will help you to learn why that can be bad; that it can introduce queues and actually result in a process slowdown, especially if it happens early in the development process and on the critical path.

I just can't say enough about this book; some other specific books on Agile software development are helpful to give you ideas of specific things to do, but this book is absolutely crucial to learn and use in your daily decision-making process.

I've studied and practiced product development for years including reading both books and research papers. This book has the best balance of anecdote and theory I've seen. If you really intend to improve product development performance you must understand the principles in this book. Other books will give you examples of how they succeeded but you will not understand why they were successful.

Getting what you need from this book requires a willingness to think about queuing theory. Since that is a basic college level operations research or real statistics (not for dummies) course, most people should be able to deal with it. Since it does use queuing theory, people with some manufacturing engineering background will get it immediately.

Once you've read the book, you will see how some simple measures can be applied to identify and diagnose problems with your current processes. These same measures will be applied again to help with balancing work among teams and address other important product development management capabilities.

"Managing the design factory" provides an excellent set of practices which can improve your product development and optimize your product development on the dimension you want it to. It provided me with key insights and fresh ideas on how to think about product development.

The book consists of four parts. The first part is a general introduction to product development and clarifies some assumptions made in the rest of the book. The second part is a set of thinking tools for product development. The third part provides concrete practices, called action tools. The last part summerizes the rest of the book and suggests actions to take.

The thinking tools in the second part are key-insights in product development. The first thinking tool is to try to think of product development economically. This also provides four ways to optimize your product development: lowest expense, lowest unit cost, highest performance and shortest time. In the rest of the book Reinertsen uses these four optimizations to show how each action tool will need to be used differently. The second thinking tool is queueing theory. It provides a view of product development as a series of queues. Managing the product development queues becomes essential. The third thinking tool is information theory. What is the value of information and how to optimize for the value. The last thinking tool is systems theory. Think of whole product development as systems, look for feedback loops and look for assumptions behind your current thinking. The thinking tools were the most interesting part of the book (in my opinion) and I thoroughly enjoyed any of these chapters.

The actions tools in part three provide concrete things to do in your product development. This part will use the thinking tools provided in part two to explain the action and also explain how they are different in the different optimizations. The tools were clear and useful. The only criticism could be that there is some duplication between "Developing products in half the time", but that was expected. Also, the tools are just introduced in one chapter and most of them could have filled a book on its own.

Conclusion. "Managing the design factory" is an excellent book on product development and provides key-insights and tools for looking at product development. I would recommend it for anyone who is involved in product development.