Newsletter Week 40 | 2021

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Hey there.I hope you've had a great week.

What I've Made For You

Book Notes: Invent and Wander by Jeff BezosGreat book. The introduction is fantastic. I'm fascinated by how Amazon had stayed true to their values; and how well it turned out (so far). In all honesty, you can read 80% of the book for free on Amazon's own site, because the shareholder letters are free to the public.

Book Notes: The Lean Startup by Eric RiesThis is a fantastic book. I highly recommend The E-Myth Revisited as well.

Single-Batch Flow

I want to share part of my notes on The Lean Startup (mentioned above) because I've already benefitted quite a lot from them.

Work in smaller batches also help prevent a large batch death spiral. Say you're working on the new release for a product. The longer you take, the greater you feel the expectations are, and the more you try to put in it... which just takes even longer! And the spiral starts.

Instead, work in small batches/single-batch flow. Do small, frequent releases.

Also, when you try to enforce large batch sizes and everyone just works for themselves and passes the result of their work to the next guy for further processing, it could cause huge issues as well. What if you made a lot of designs (which took a long time), and the engineer responsible for implementing them doesn't understand them? Then they'll have to either interrupt you, or redo the design. And if you're not available, they have no choice but to redo it. This is why so much work isn't created as it was designed.

Batch size is the amount of items that move between stages. A single-piece flow is where you have a batch size of 1. It's basically just where you process one item at a time.

Single-piece flow is faster than having larger batch sizes because we tend to underestimate the amount of time spent organizing, moving, sorting, stacking the larger batch. So single-batching would be faster for the entire system.

Single-batch flow is also superior because you have a finished product much sooner than if you do a larger batch size. Then you can check for errors, etc.

Working in small batches can reduce waste because you can check for errors faster.

Reducing batch size allows us to learn faster than the competition.

What I've gained: Our project group has implemented the single-batch flow principle into our Scrum planning, which was previously hard due to constraints set by the University. Implementing the principle has accelerated our workflows massively, and we're much better off for it.

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I have been reading Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave by Ryan Holiday. Courage is one of the four cardinal virtues; and the book is the first in the series about them. I can already highly recommend it.

To your success. Regards,

Christian Bager Bach Houmann