Hey Debbie,

I'm finding this one a bit too polarising to be actionable for those who are dealing with unavoidable constraints in terms of scale of their organisation (i.e. smaller product teams who necessarily have to act differently to those teams who have far more resources - and bigger communication problems). No problem for the uninitiated, your message is just inspirational for them, and I support you there.

Most of your axioms I agree with when they are applied to dysfunctional workplaces and poor management teams. No challenge there. Those places have to change and probably won't for a long time.

I also agree that UR is a highly disciplined skilled approach, like product engineering and product design is, and should not be replaced or worked-around with subpar execution by anyone (simply because those people neither see the value in doing it properly, nor the value lost in doing it badly). Your message there, I totally support.

But for those teams who don't get the ideal number of people with all the ideal skillsets all working perfectly together towards perfection, all day every day (whatever that looks like in the real world). They have to compromise suitably and effectively, and they necessarily have to adapt every day. Building product absolutely requires frequent compromise from the standard - and that's why you need experienced people who get uncomfortable doing that, doing it. No one says every team has the perfect engineers nor designers doing their job in 100% disciplined manner either.

Should they? yes! Do they? - let's hope so most of the time, but sometimes they don't because they have to make compromises, some of them very ugly.

I would say the main thrust of the piece is that we are dealing with the age-old challenge of dealing with effectiveness. Where doing the learning work and communicating the learnings to the decision making work needs to be as harmonized as possible to get the best results. The 18th-20th centuries taught everyone that to achieve improvements in that, we divide the work in smaller tasks and get specialists to do it each step, and get managers to make the design/process improvement decisions. This made perfect sense back then, and increased output by 6 orders of magnitude from the way craftspeople were doing the work! Hard to argue the effectiveness of that improvement. Later, lean manufacturing improved on that by moving the improvement decisions making down to those operated the process. They got another order of magnitude improvement out of that. Then someone decided to apply that stuff to creative industries like ours in the digital world, and it flopped big time because we have an adaptive system, not a fixed one. We know that the better solution is for cross-functional people in smaller teams outperform larger specialised teams by an order of magnitude. This is the fundamental problem behind the main argument of who does what when and how.

I also want to point out that, I agree that the lean startup turned out to be a bit of a scam (as people only heard "Build, build, build and MVP!"), but in lean manufacturing (the roots of the lean principles we have chosen to apply to our industry) the "elimination of waste" is somewhat achievable when there is only one way (the realised "best way") to produce a part or a product the most efficiently in a production line. Remember you cant eliminate all bottlenecks either, only make them smaller and subordinate to them.

We simply don't have "one way" to do something right when it comes to doing creative work with such variance in constraints that we have to deal with day to day. There is no production line in our world. There is also no machine in the lean manufacturing world that can adapt to the outside world as it changes every day (like the world we creative people live in). That is where lean manufacturing principles, while exceptionally useful, simply cannot deliver perfection in our practices. As well as they can in lean manufacturing.

So you have to accept that the pursuit of "elimination of waste" is absolutely very useful one, AND you will never achieve perfection in our world of finding a product that a market wants, for any meaningful period of time. The world we are living in and the demands it puts on the creative people working in our creative industries will never permit that to happen - despite what the people managing these organisations would prefer.