An academic article co-authored with stefan-thomke, published in California Management Review 41, no. 1 (Fall 1998), pages 8–30. This is one of Reinertsen's most important academic publications and predates the Agile Manifesto by three years.
The article argues for increasing development agility rather than improving forecasting accuracy — a then-contrarian position. The central empirical finding: flexible-technology projects outperformed inflexible ones by 2.2x in terms of development outcomes under uncertainty. The authors document how managing-variability through flexible processes and architectures produces better results than the conventional response of more detailed upfront planning.
The paper foreshadows several ideas Reinertsen would later formalize in principles-of-product-development-flow: the value of preserving optionality, the fast-feedback discipline that lets teams respond to new information, and the u-curve-optimization pattern showing that neither rigid process nor pure chaos is optimal — the economic sweet spot lies in calibrated flexibility.
The Thomke-Reinertsen collaboration at this stage was productive for both: Thomke brought empirical research methodology from Harvard Business School; Reinertsen brought the economic and queueing-theory framework. The paper is notable for grounding agility arguments in data and economic reasoning at a time when most flexibility advocacy was qualitative. The 2.2x performance finding gave practitioners a concrete benchmark for the value of investing in flexible development infrastructure.
This article sits between managing-the-design-factory (1997), which introduced the economic toolkit, and principles-of-product-development-flow (2009), which synthesized it. It also anticipates the HBR collaboration with Thomke that would produce six-myths-of-product-development and wrong-lessons-from-manufacturing more than a decade later.