Chapter 9

Chapter 9

1. Small batches

   • Every Lean startup technique we have discussed so far works its magic in two ways: by converting push methods to pull and reducing batch sizes.
     • Working in small batches ensures that a startup can minimize the expenditure of time, money, and effort that ultimately turns out to have been wasted.
   • The biggest advantage of working in small batches is that quality problems can be identified much sooner.
     • Small batches let people discover the truth faster.

2. Large batches

   • Behind the scenes, in the development and design of the product itself, large batches are still the rule. The work that goes into the development of a new product proceeds on a virtual assembly line.
     • Imagine that the letter´s didn’t fit in the envelopes. With the large-batch approach, we wouldn’t find that out until nearly the end.
       • Large-batch death spiral: Large batches tend to grow over time. Because moving the batch forward often results in additional work, rework, delays, and interruptions, everyone has an incentive to do work in ever-larger batches, trying to minimize this overhead. This is called large-batch death spiral.

3. Example small batches vs. large batches - letter folding:

   • Fold all of the letters, attach the seal and put on the stamps. This approach is called singlepiece flow in lean manufacturing. It works because of the surprising power of small batches.
     • The small-batch approach produces a finished product every few seconds, whereas the large-batch approach must deliver all the products at once, at the end. Even if the amount of time that each process took was exactly the same, the small batch production approach still would be superior.
   • Single-piece flow is so named because it has a batch size of one. The extra time required to sort, stack, and move around the large piles of half-complete envelopes when it’s done the other way.

4. ·

   • Small batches
     • Instead of buying large specialized machines that could produce thousands of parts at a time, Toyota used smaller general-purpose machines that could produce a wide variety of parts in small batches.
       • This required figuring out ways to reconfigure each machine rapidly to make the right part at the right time.
         • By focusing on this “changeover time”, Toyota was able to produce entire automobiles by using small batches throughout the process.
     • Toyota did not ask workers to work faster but reimagined and restructured the work that needed to be done. Every investment in better tools and process had a corresponding benefit in terms of shrinking the batch size of work.
       • The smaller batch sizes created a greater diversity of products and Toyota could therefore serve its smaller, more fragmented markets and still compete with the mass producers.
   • Andon Chord
     • an assembly line works best when it is functioning smoothly, rolling car off the end of the line. The andon chord can interrupt this careful flow as the line is halted repeatedly. However, the benefits of finding and fixing problems faster outweigh this cost.

5. Example of Continuous deployment in the software industry

   • 1. Hardware becoming software The latest phones and tablets computers are little more than a screen connected to the internet. Almost all of their value is determined by their software. What can be built out of software can be modified much faster than a physical or mechanical device can.
     • The lesson: by reducing batch size, we can get through the build-measure-learn feedback loop more quickly than our competitors can. The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential advantage that startups must possess.
   • 2. Fast production changes Many assembly lines are set up to allow each new product that comes off the line to be customized completely without sacrificing quality or cost-effectiveness. Historically, this has been used to offer the customer many choices of product, but in the future, this capability will allow the designers of products to get much faster feedback about new versions.
   • 3. 3D printing and rapid prototyping tools New technologies are allowing entrepreneurs to build small batches of products that are of the same quality but at much lower cost and much faster.

6. School of One: In school of One, students have daily playlists of their learning tasks that attuned to each student´s earning needs, based on that students readiness and learning style. There are assessments built into each activity so that data can be fed back to the teacher to choose appropriate tasks for the next playlist. This data can be aggregated across classes, schools or even whole districts. You can see immediately the change on those of your students who are at that point in the curriculum. If you judge it to be a good change, you could roll it out immediately for every single student.

7. Experiment early: As soon as we can formulate a hypothesis we want to test, the product development team should be engineered to design and run this experiment as quickly as possible, using the smallest batch size that will get the job done.

8. Build-measure-learn really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to getThus, it’s not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions. Any other work is waste.

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