What I learnt from 005: An Introduction to Second Generation Lean Product Development by Don Reinertsen.

I attended to another meetup organized by Adventure with Agile .
It was An Introduction to Second Generation Lean Product Development by Don Reinertsen.

Don is well known person and apparently it doesn't need introduction. Sadly, as usual I didn't have idea who he is due my lack of focus on names.
According to his company website :

"Don is President of Reinertsen & Associates, and the author of three best-selling books on product development. For 30 years he has focused on creating fundamental changes in the way organizations develop products. "  Source: http://reinertsenassociates.com/about/

My first impression from this meetup was that I felt like I went for quantum physics lecture. This meetup was for people who need deep knowledge about product development processes in general and this meetup was an excellent introduction .for second generation of product development processes. It was even more useful for people who  plan to read his famous book and trying to understand "black magic" of product development processes.

Is it means that it was useless for people who just start journey with  agile/lean development ?
No. It turns out to be quite useful .

Why? Don talked in deep details about his 7 ideas ,which are:

•     Understanding your economics
•     manage your queues
•     exploit variability 
•     enable smaller batches
•     Control WIP and start rates
•     Prioritize  based on economics
•     Accelerate feedback

You will notice many things mentioned there can come useful ,when you are developer/scrum master  and trying understand business point of view and it helps you to talk to business  in way that will be see business value of it.

Below ,you can find some loose points  from Meetup (I miss 80% of goodness probably)

• When Don talks about understanding your economics. He focus on cost of delay and explains why Quality analysis is better than intuition.
• It is myth that higher utilization means faster development,where truth is that going above 80-85% is worthless and it will cause more harm and problems than benefits. I agree with this. Some people expect from you near 100% time utilization which is simply unreal and force provide false data to cover real time utilization.
• Use queue size not capacity utilization ,because managing queue is key for economics of product development.
• It was very interesting for me to hear about difference between lean product development in manufacturing and software .It's true as not all measurements in manufacturing product development doesn't have the same impact in software development.
• Quick feedback is crucial as it means cheaper fix, easier to change. That's one of important points , because it ensures that product is build according to expectation and requirements as quicker you spot difference then easier is back to track.
• Control WIP is one of key element of Kanban and it seems Don prefers Kanban approach . My little experience  gives me impression than Kanban works great for support team who focus on fixing bugs or team that are constantly disturb by external request that ignore current plan. 

Sadly, I didn't remember more from his meet up,

Best quote from Don's meetup was when he talk about interview with engineer about how he develops software that was so successful.

Why product was so successful? 

"Engineer answered: because we develop software so fast that marketing didn't have chance to change their mind."

Networking after Meetup turns up to be very useful too as I talk with some awesome people about ...retrospective and how to do it and how to evolve retrospective over time.
I will try to use these knowledge on Retrospective when I will do it next week.

If you looking for useful meetup about Agile. Advanture with Agile (AWA) seems be worth to join in.