Lean Enterprise

I recently finished reading Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organization Innovate at Scale by Barry O’Reilly, Jez Humble, and Joanne Molesky. I found this book motivating and pushed me to explorer some of the topics discussed in action at work. One of the ideas that I could see at work was HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) being used to make decisions. This book pushes you away from that practice and towards an approach of experimentation.

Experimentation starts by using the scientific method, liked you used in your grade-schools science class. First you make a hypothesis, you then try proving it out with a test from which you measure and can come to some conclusions about your initial hypothesis. To help us stay focused once we have our hypotheses but before we test we must decide on The One Metric That Matters. This measurement will help tell us the what, why and how.

How can this be accomplished? The authors suggest creating the MVP (minimal viable product) for our hypothesis along with anything that is needed to measure The One Metric That Matters and using the results to move forward with the product or to pivot in the direction that the data is leading you to a potentially new product entirely. This process is called evaluating the Product/Market fit.

Once you have your fit you can begin to use the new product to exploit the market and grow your enterprise. This is done by using Continuous Improvement which draws much of it’s methodology from the Toyota Kata. The idea that we should take small and incremental steps to ward personal and enterprise wide improvements. There are many similar patterns like the Deming (PDCA) loop or the OODA loop.

From here the authors get into more details on how you can leverage this continuous improvement to identify value and increase the flow of your product. Some concepts they suggest are:

• Limit work in process (Kanban) to improve flow
• Use Cost of Delay to determine priority of features
• Implement Continuous Integration and Test Automation speed up the feedback loop
• Create a Deployment Pipeline using Continuous Delivery to help automate the full stack

The book finishes up by talking about how to apply these concepts enterprise wide to transform your company into a culture of innovation.