From the monthly archives:

February 2007

Toyota and Word-of-Mouth Marketing

by Pete Abilla February 28, 2007

A VP of Marketing from Wiley Publishers wrote me a few weeks ago and offered me a book to review.  I asked why and her comment was that she noticed that I have a lot a post about customer obsession and that my subscribership was healthy.  I said, "sure, send me the book."  I’ve started [...]

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The Toyota Product Development System

by Pete Abilla February 27, 2007

There is much literature on the Toyota Production System, otherwise knows as Lean Manufacturing.  There is much less literature, however, on how Toyota develops products.  We know, for example, that the Agile Software Methodology and movement is mostly influenced by Toyota’s Product Development System (TPDS), but there is less information on TPDS, than there is [...]

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Genchi Genbutsu & Ethnography

by Pete Abilla February 26, 2007

Genchi Genbutsu is a key concept at Toyota and the Toyota Production System; it means "go and see for yourself." While doing some research on user-centered design for a class I teach at BYU, I came across a fascinating article on Toyota with an excellent example that shows how Genchi Genbutsu is way of doing [...]

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Lean for Software: Interview with Mary Poppendieck

by Pete Abilla February 24, 2007

Mary and Tom Poppendieck, the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback), which won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004 and, the sequel Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback) were recently interviewed on the history of Lean, or the Toyota Production System, and how the [...]

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The Toyota Code of Conduct

by Pete Abilla February 23, 2007

For the Operations and Supply Chain Management class that I teach at BYU, I’ve been doing some research on Supplier Code of Conduct, or the tenets by which a supplier can be accepted into a network; this is often called "Order Qualifier" — that is, the basic items that a supplier must meet in order [...]

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The Interface is the Product

by Pete Abilla February 21, 2007

User Interfaces and — any product Interface — is very difficult to build.  How do you design eating utensils for people with arthritic hands?  Answering that question is not easy — the physiology of arthritic hands is complex; designing objects that hands with arthritis can grasp, hold, and use is a difficult problem.  That’s just [...]

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Burning Google Bridges

by Pete Abilla February 20, 2007

I believe in creating bridges between groups and, in general, cooperation and teamwork.  I subscribe to the Toyota Production System axiom of "respect for people".  While I believe in building bridges, there are some bridges I don’t mind burning at all. It’s been over a year since my infamous Google Job Interview.  Since that time, [...]

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Living with the Suboptimal

by Pete Abilla February 18, 2007

Launching a new website, front-end store, or product requires several trade-off’s.  Here are two principles I learned at Amazon that still ring true to me. Living with the Suboptimal The result of external competitive pressures and a resource-constrained development environment is that we almost always have to live with the suboptimal: we have to launch [...]

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Simplifying Shmula

by Pete Abilla February 18, 2007

I’ve needed to unclutter my life of non-essential things, interest, and activities: I need to simplify my life.  So, yesterday and today, I decided to do two things.  First, I unsubscribed from 36 blogs; and second, I decided to break linkedin connections of strangers I don’t know. Unsubscribing from blogs was gratifying.  My criteria was [...]

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