Agile Product Development: How to Design Innovative Products That Create Customer Value

Abstract

With all due regards to taylor, this one single line from the world of manufacturing has perhaps caused more damage to the entire knowledge industry in the last hundred years than everything else put together. during the twentieth century, we blindly adopted this mantra without realizing that manufacturing and knowledge creation are two different worlds—they are like chalk and cheese in that what works in one doesn’t necessarily work in the other. manufacturing is fundamentally a production problem, and knowledge creation is more like a design problem. most certainly, there can’t be a “system” to developing new and innovative products—we must leverage human creativity, judgment and continuous learning to solve the problems effectively.While the production world was all about predictability, control, “Plan A,” organization, accuracy, structure, tools, automation, and so on, the world of knowledge was full of messy creation, cognitive work, experimentation, mistakes, adaptation, “Plan B,” iteration, prototyping, serendipity, wicked problems, people dependency, and so on. the methods that worked well for production (such as the waterfall model, frameworks like PmBoK and cmmi, and standards like iSo9000) were well suited for a world where a problem was all about producing a replica of something that had been already designed—for example, assembling cars or manufacturing mobile phones. However, these methods, standards, and frameworks were fairly useless when it came to “managing” a creative process for they sought false value in accuracy, predictability, repeatability, and efficiency when these were not even the key drivers of value in a constantly changing world. Having been part of several endeavors where we tried to tame the software process using industrial-era thinking, irealized the naivety and futility of our efforts. over time, ihad opportunities to learn better ways to build products, and this book is my attempt to put it all together