This book bears many analogies to product (and software) development that, to me, seem much more suitable than many of the manufacturing parallels that are often made when talking about things like Kanban or the Theory of Constraints, albeit they also still hold their value in certain places.

Nevertheless, the nature of product (and software) development is in many parts fundamentally different than the challenges of optimising a production line, and so are the choices to be made. Using analogies like telecommunication networks, CPU scheduling or multi-level caches when talking about queues, priorities or ressources and response times made much more sense to me in that respect.

Finally, the book does not talk about optimisation just for the sake of optimisation (where optimisation can mean a lot of different things), but always stresses the need for holistically and economically founded choices. As I always strive to keep a systemic view when thinking about organizations and processes, this was something that I additionally appreciated.

While I sometimes wished Donald G. Reinertsen would have diven deeper into some of his thoughts and ideas, his book is already packed with lots of thought provoking information, making it a read that is not always easily to digest, especially while commuting.