Design Brief | Five Applications of Lean Product and Process Development Thinking in a Digital World

No digital tool can replace the thoughtfulness and discernment of human beings—especially human beings working together—which is just one reason why lean product and process development (LPPD) principles continue to help leaders strengthen their teams and, therefore, their businesses (hardware or software or a combination of both). As we kick off our Design Brief issue on LPPD thinking in a digital world, here are five examples of what LPPD looks in practice at companies like GE Appliances, Sensata Technologies, Somfy, and more. 

1. Sensing the Lean Shift 
An interview with Sensata Technologies’ Tommy Ver Elst by Roberto Priolo for Planet Lean 

There is no doubt our understanding of lean thinking has deepened tremendously since those early days. We now understand that Lean is about adaptability, mindset, and solving real problems, and technology just enhances that. The goal is still the same: create value without waste and help people do their best work. Today, Lean touches everything from culture to strategy to how we use technology. 

2. Software’s Quality Leap: Three Lessons from Toyota’s Dantotsu Approach to Reduce Defects at Scale at Theodo 
By Fabrice Bernhard  

We had been suffering for quite some time from intermittent failures in the automated testing of our code. These were not related to underlying issues in our code but to deeper issues in the Jest open-source testing library we were using. The teams had dismissed them as ‘unavoidable flakiness.’ Since it was a known problem affecting many of our teams and others worldwide, we decided to investigate further. It was a hard problem to solve. But with focused effort, we devised a permanent fix, which we contributed to the open-source library. The problem is now permanently solved not only for our teams but for all the library’s other users, not to mention the energy savings that would result from preventing millions of wasted CPU cycles. 

After two years of deploying such learnings across Theodo, 80% of our projects now measure the number of defects categorized by detection stages A to E. We have refined a standard for effectively analyzing those defects to help tech leads adopt it within their teams. And we are working on making defect analysis part of the team’s routine to accelerate their learning and identify the recurring problems that would benefit from an organizational solution. 

3. The Next Revolution in Software Product Design
By Sandrine Olivencia

While frameworks like agile, widely used in the high-tech world, can help manage growth, they often fragment the product vision by spreading responsibility across different people with limited influence. When this happens, the focus shifts from maintaining a cohesive, innovative product to merely delivering features. But letting go of the product ultimately means letting go of growth. 

Additionally, many modern product teams lack accountability for profitability, resulting in development and innovation without a clear understanding of the impact on the bottom line. As a result, the company suffers in multiple ways: progress slows significantly due to legacy systems, cash flow diminishes as lead times increase, and the organization becomes increasingly bogged down by inefficiencies that are difficult to overcome. 

We can avoid this trap by building an organization around chief product engineers—leaders who understand the full spectrum of product creation, from user experience to technical trade-offs and financial performance. 

4. Craftsmanship Revolution: GE Appliances Redefines Appliance Product Development 
By Dave Leone and Mark Weaver  

If a business wants to create a meaningful and lasting transformation, whether it’s craftsmanship, digital technology, dimensional control – you name it – it must have a small set of people who eat, sleep, and breathe the transformation daily. They are passionate about it. They generate the continued momentum to keep pushing, pushing, and pushing the transformation because they show up every day expecting a certain level of excellence. They get people to look at products the way customers see them and be passionate about them, too. They get people to think, ‘I’m only doing the hinges, but I’m going to do them better than anybody else.’ 

That way of thinking about craftsmanship coupled with digital technologies has fundamentally redefined how we design products. It has led to a tremendous amount of innovation, which has fundamentally changed our company for the better. 

5. Rethinking R&D at Somfy
By Catherine Chabiron for Planet Lean

Projects are too often reduced to a sequence of deliverables, of things to do under a time constraint. A project manager will feel they are either permanently waiting for others or drowning in new requests.   

We already saw with Linda how lean thinking helped her create opportunities for collaboration at regular intervals and in-depth conversations with key stakeholders about knowledge gaps, problem-solving, changes, and associated risks. 

But if we dig deeper, we will soon start to see a project not only as a series of deliverables (you do have to produce CAD, documentation, bills of materials, quality control, tests), but also as a sequence of decisions on the product and the process. I can almost see those of you who are familiar with projects in engineering or IT raising their brows: “Yes, we know that, isn’t it what project gates are supposed to do?” 

Project gate systems, even when designed with the best of intentions, soon turn to bureaucracy. This may not be true in your case, but passing the gate will often mean producing the correct quality documentation or a load of specifications rather than discussing actual technical options on the product or the architecture that best fulfils customer expectations.