Reinertsen's first book, co-authored with preston-smith. Aimed at product development managers, it introduced the core argument that speed-to-market is an economic decision variable, not just a project management concern. Made the case that overlapping activities, reducing batch sizes, and accelerating feedback loops could dramatically reduce time-to-market without sacrificing quality.
Less theoretically rigorous than his later works but more accessible to a practitioner audience. The book reframed time-to-market from a scheduling problem into an economic one — the foundational move that Reinertsen would deepen and formalize across the next two decades. Established the framework that managing-the-design-factory would subsequently extend with queueing theory and mathematical grounding.
The book's significance lies less in its specific tools than in its framing: by insisting that development speed has quantifiable economic consequences, Reinertsen laid the groundwork for economic approaches to product development decisions. This positioned the work as an early precursor to what would eventually become the lean software and agile movements' economic justifications. Its publication is documented in the event publication-developing-products-half-time.