The Design Brief | Obeya Principles for Visualizing Product Development, In-Person or Virtual

So many issues in product development happen when leaders and teams fail to manage the interfaces between functional disciplines. It’s a huge source of waste, frustration, and failure as Jim Morgan, author of Designing the Future, reminds us. An obeya (a.k.a. “big room” in Japanese) is a lean product and process development (LPPD) tool that can immediately help.

But how do we create these big rooms for cross-functional teams to meet, make work visible, and solve hard problems in a virtual world? What about when team members are working in different time zones? When some are remote and others are in-office? Success means sticking to the principles of obeya and making your obeya work for you and your organizational context. Read on for more practical advice from LEI coaches and Design Brief contributors.

Steve Shoemaker on the purpose of obeya and how to coordinate global teams:

“The obeya is a common starting place for most lean product and process development journeys. It builds off the value-stream map and quickly helps the team see the flow of work for better value creation. It also helps team members see who their customers are from a value-creation perspective … The obeya serves as a coordination center to ensure the value stream flows smoothly. It allows the team to see development in real-time and respond to problems as mole hills before they become mountains.”

Read more: Lean Product and Process Development at Scale: Implementing Obeya Across Global Teams

Katrina Appell on how to think about creating your virtual obeya and how leadership behaviors will determine its usefulness:

“One aspect of lean is creating our processes and adapting technology to support those processes rather than letting technology define our processes. When abruptly changing how we work together, it can be easy to let technology influence the way we work. It is worth taking some time to reflect on the purpose of our processes and tools and how we are using technology to support our objectives.

“People have had a lot of interest in [creating obeyas] remotely for a long time. With obeyas, we are trying to create conditions for teams to effectively work together to make decisions and solve problems …

“Not every tool needs to do everything, but collectively people need all the pieces, and obeya can provide it all. We need to be mindful of what our behaviors are and do they support creating an enabling environment for people to work together effectively.”

Read more: How a Virtual Obeya Can Enable Effective Teamwork

John Drogosz on how to make sure the obeya truly works for your team and using it to get help on problems at the right time:

“The first month of obeya is a challenging time for most teams. They are both learning new ways to interact with one another while still trying to get their project work done. In many cases, while teams are experimenting there will be lively debates on various visuals – which ones work, which ones don’t. People will also be editorializing how much detail to share during obeya stand-up meetings.

“A best practice for the first few months of a new obeya is to build in a 10-minute debrief at the end of every other stand-up meeting to ask the team how the space and meeting rituals are working and what needs to be improved.”

Read more: Developing Your Obeya Stage-by-Stage