Books on Learning-First Product Development

Before you begin making a change, you must understand where you are going... or at the very least, how to get where you want to go. For an organization to be successful in changing, its members must each understand their roles.

If what you have read here sounds a bit intriguing, and you want to understand better what Learning-First Product Development means, or you want to understand the contrast between how Toyota does product development vs. most of the rest of the world, then you need to read our latest book: Ready, Set, Dominate. You can now pre-order it from our publisher, Oaklea Press.

Since publishing our first book, Product Development for The Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It, we have been working with numerous companies to implement Learning-First Product Development. In doing so, we've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work, and have gained tremendous insight.

In Ready, Set, Dominate, we pick up the story of the fictional IRT company one year after the first book ends. Jon and team have made some progress, but they've encountered many of the same problems we observe at companies trying to implement Toyota's practices. What's worse, IRT's Board of Directors has lost patience and hired a new Chief Financial Officer whose mission is to prop up profit through aggressive cost cutting. Racing against time, Jon has to figure out how to immediately put his company on a path to Toyota-like domination or see his company gutted.

As a bonus, Ready, Set, Dominate includes a pair of case studies describing two real companies who are on the journey to a Toyota-inspired product development system, and achieving significant benefits along the way. Learn how to find your path to domination, and understand the elements that are essential to success! Pre-order the book today... click here.

While we try to answer as many questions as possible with our books, development organizations will always have unique attributes that require more tailored Q&A. Our Seminars are tailored to stimulate ideas, to promote conversation, and to get those key organization-specific questions answered. Further, we can greatly accelerate your transformation to Learning-First Product Development via direct mentoring of your engineers on their own engineering problems in our series of short Workshops.