Eric Ries introduced the term innovation accounting to refer to the rigorous process of defining, experimenting, measuring, and communicating the true progress of innovation for new products, business models, or initiatives. To understand whether our product is valuable and hold ourselves to account, we focus on obtaining admissible evidence and pl

Even today, many people think that Lean is a management-led activity and that it’s about simply cutting costs. In reality, it requires investing to remove waste and reduce failure demand — it is a worker-led activity that, ultimately, can continuously drive down costs and improve quality and productivity.

What my NUMMI experience taught me that was so powerful was that the way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave — what they do. Those of us trying to change our organizations’ culture need to define the things we want to do, the ways we want to behave and want each other to beha

There are two other factors that strongly predict high performance in IT. The first is a high-trust organizational culture as described in Chapter 1. The second is a lightweight peer-reviewed change approval process. Many organizations have an independent team to approve changes that go to production. However, the data shows that while such externa

At the beginning of every postmortem, every participant should read aloud the following words, known as the Retrospective Prime Directive: “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situatio

By keeping our initial customer base small — not chasing vanity numbers to get too big too fast — we force ourselves to keep it simple and maintain close contact with our customers every step of the way. This allows teams more time with customers to listen, build trust, and ensure early adopters that we’re ready to help. Remember, reaching big numb

find out if you’re really doing CI, ask your team the following questions: Are all the developers on the team checking into trunk (not just merging from trunk into their branches or working copies) at least once a day? In other words, are they doing trunk-based development and working in small batches? Does every change to trunk kick off a build pr

The paradox is that when managers focus on productivity, long-term improvements are rarely made. On the other hand, when managers focus on quality, productivity improves continuously. John Seddon

The key to being successful with these cycles (and the scientific method in general) is to use them systematically and continuously. Applying them systematically means using them as a general tool to explore all types of risk, ensuring that the expense of running an experiment is commensurate with the value of the information we will discover. Appl