Managing the design factory

What Hacker News says

1. SeriousGamesKitMay 2025
   I've made a habit of regularly ordering in out-of-print business books when I see them recommended by people whose writing I have found useful. Some highlights have been 'The Rickover Effect', which details the construction of the first nuclear power plants, and 'Selling Microsoft', which discusses the day-to-day life and structure of enterprise technology salespeople in the 90s.

   By far the best has been 'Managing the Design Factory' by Donald Reinertsen, which I strongly recommend to software engineering managers. I really appreciated the exploration of how organising teams and tasks impacts development speed, cost, performance and unit cost in different ways. Even though it was written in the 90s, I don't think I've seen as good a discussion on how architectural decisions impact corporate strategy.

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2. buescherJul 2024
   Reinertsen's books are very, very good. The most recent and most up-to-date is Principles of Product Development Flow, which that chart came from. The previous one, Managing the Design Factory, is pretty similar and I think it's a better read.

   Another great takeaway from it is to prioritize things by cost of delay, or even better, what he calls Weighted Shortest Job First, where you divide the cost of delay by the expected length of the task. The only problem is that the same people that want to get oddly formal and inappropriately rigorous with things like story points will want to turn cost-of-delay into an accounting exercise - or object that it's impossible because they don't have the accounting system for it - which misses the point entirely.

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3. maroonblazerApr 2021
   Any list of this sort should include "Managing The Design Factory" by Donald G. Reinertsen. A thought-provoking evaluation of what to care about when managing software teams.
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4. mch82May 2020
   “The Innovator’s Prescription” (Clay Christensen) explains the Innovator’s Dilemma better than the original book and introduces jobs-to-be-done with the milkshake story.

   “Creativity Inc.” (Ed Catmull) explains how Pixar manages people & throws in a few insights from mature (post Apple firing) Steve Jobs.

   “Managing the Design Factory” (Don Reinertsen) explains how to prioritize projects and analyze a business for bottlenecks in order to minimize cost of delay.

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5. akoMay 2019
   There's pretty good theory behind the idea of minimizing latency to improve throughput. One of the better books on this is "Managing the Design Factory", and a followup called "The principles of product development flow".

   These books are not about software development, but of product development in general. The first one actually predates agile, published in 1997.

   Core idea is that minimizing the size of the tasks is the best way to improve productivity. Not getting it done as quickly as possible, but to decrease the size.

   Remember that product development (new, innovative, uncertainties) vs product manufacting (repeatable), is not a new problem, and not unique to the software industry. There's a lot to learn from product development in other industries.

   Another interesting read is "The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process And Technology" which talks about ways of making product development predictive, and less risky.

   It's interesting to see how little software is used to improve the process of software development. Other industries use a lot of software (cad/cam, visual modelling, testing, impact analysis) to improve efficiency and quality of product development. Software for product development is a huge market.

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6. maroonblazerNov 2016
   In that case have you read "Managing the Design Factory" by Reinertsen? Excellent book on managing projects and teams.
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