Katherine Radeka > Quotes

“No matter how good their CAD tools are, eventually they must build and test the product in the physical world.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“But that doesn’t mean the plan is as stable as the plan to build a house. In middle development, teams still have learning to do, but the team’s focus is more on producing the deliverables that their partners need to produce the product at scale, sell it and support it in the field. While the team still has some Key Decisions to make and Knowledge Gaps to close, their focus turns more towards executing decisions that have already been made.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“The Program Leader focuses the team’s learning on the Key Decisions to help them recognize the knowledge that is most important for them to build: the most important Knowledge Gaps.”
― Katherine Radeka, The Shortest Distance Between You and Your New Product: How Innovators Use Rapid Learning Cycles to Get Their Best Ideas to Market Faster, 2nd Edition

“phase-gates are essential for effective physical product development because of the escalating levels of investment”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“People are used to sharing their activities in meetings, and so that’s what they do—instead of sharing what they learned, they share what they did.”
― Katherine Radeka, The Shortest Distance Between You and Your New Product: How Innovators Use Rapid Learning Cycles to Get Their Best Ideas to Market Faster, 2nd Edition

“For those aspects of the design that are high risk because they are entirely new and unproven, teams can choose to reduce this risk by exploring multiple alternatives. This allows them to delay the Last Responsible Moment for the final decision to preserve flexibility, and to learn faster about the alternatives so they are more likely to find the one that best meets their needs.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Agile Software Development constructs that are not helpful when there are dependencies, long lead times, and resources from a variety of specific disciplines to manage with high cost-of-change. They don’t start over with a new plan every sprint or program increment.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Every learning cycle is a timebox: a fixed amount of time that the team will use to learn as much as it can about its Knowledge Gaps.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“At the end of every learning cycle, teams have Learning Cycle Events to share what they’ve learned. When it’s time to make Key Decisions, teams have Integration Events to bring together the decision makers with the knowledge the team has built to close the decisions.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“These scrums provide opportunities for problems to surface and for a team member who’s overloaded to get help from another team member. Software teams benefit from meeting every day because their batches (user stories) are small enough to require daily coordination.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“The key question to answer about any prototype is “What do I want to learn?” Prototypes validate the earlier decisions and design work, so often what we want to learn is this: “How well are the different parts working together?” and “Are we on target to meet our specifications and requirements?” If there’s a faster, better, cheaper way to learn those things, then it’s not yet time for a full system prototype.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“shorten the time from decision to validation — but the implementation for hardware is completely different.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Teams make decisions in Early Development that don’t get validated until later in the process. Then they have to go backwards to fix the problem, causing project delays, cost overruns and disappointing results.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Key Decisions have a sequence that reflects the process for executing the innovation. When teams understand how Key Decisions flow into one another, the sequence and timing for these decisions and who is ultimately responsible for making the decisions, they will be better prepared to make these decisions”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“If the group has done its work with emulators, simulators, small subsystem prototypes, convergence and other experiments, the team will be able to deliver a full system prototype that needs less work before moving on to the next phase.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“A daily stand-up can get frustrating — it can seem like nothing’s moving. Teams usually do better with a Status Event two or three times per week instead of a daily scrum.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Gate Reviews focus on questions around acceptable levels of risk, strategic alignment and business value.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Agile software teams solve the problems with waterfall by building their software incrementally, making only the decisions around the specific work packages they’ve chosen to complete in a sprint. They delay even the decisions about which work packages or user stories to implement, choosing them out of a backlog at the start of each sprint. They get immediate feedback, first from their own tests and then from the users at a Demo to validate their decisions.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“The team quickly realized that the kanban board wasn’t helping as much as they thought. They could see the work on the board, and at first that had been exciting. But the work wasn’t moving.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“how to use Agile for physical products: Ask “What will you learn?” instead of “What will you do?” Make decisions at the right time, with the right people and the best available knowledge. Visualize the flow of knowledge from idea to launch.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Agile achieves speed, flexibility and responsiveness by working in small batches”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“The inherent problem of waterfall development is that it forces a team to make decisions without the knowledge needed to make those decisions with confidence.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Small batches create speed, flexibility and responsiveness for software projects.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“In software development, user stories can deliver direct user value independently”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Optimize batch sizes Limit work-in-process Put repeating events on a cadence Prioritize batches”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Instead of making decisions early and waiting to the end to validate their decisions, they tried to learn as much as they could before committing to a decision.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“the software team needs some way to validate their work before the responses from actual hardware are available. Simulators model behaviors from subsystems through the full system in virtual space — including user behavior. An emulator is a physical device that imitates the behavior of one subsystem, providing realistic inputs and outputs so that another subsystem can be developed independently.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Early Development is all about making better decisions to set up the teams for success in middle and late development, then middle development is all about reducing risk of mistakes when these decisions are executed.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“Agile don’t hold true for physical product development: It’s much more difficult to develop a physical product by breaking it down into a single workstream of relatively independent features”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development

“The user value delivered by a physical product can’t be broken down in the same way.”
― Katherine Radeka, When Agile Gets Physical: How to Use Agile Principles to Accelerate Hardware Development