Guide ·
Lean principles, applied to software
Value, flow, and waste — without the poster version.
Lean is a way of seeing work, not a ceremony. The principles that matter for a software studio are simple enough to use on a Tuesday.
Define value from the person who receives the work. A feature is valuable when it changes their outcome: less time, fewer errors, more revenue, less risk. Internal convenience is not value until it shows up in one of those.
Map the flow of one job. Count the waits. Most of the calendar time in a process is not the work itself. Software that speeds up a step nobody was waiting on will disappoint you.
Pull, don't stockpile. Build the next slice when the last one has been used, not when the backlog looks thin. Inventory in software is unreleased code and untested ideas.
Seek perfection as a direction. The point of a retrospective is one change to how you work, tried on the next cycle. A list of twelve improvements is a way to choose none of them.
Respect the people closest to the work. They already know the workaround. Your job is to make the workaround unnecessary, not to lecture them about process.