What's important in product development, the authors say, isn't just following the right steps -- it's how the work is done. Until organizations fundamentally view people as central and leaders act accordingly, the risk of development process improvement efforts not actually improving anything is frighteningly high. In practice, the authors contend, most companies invest very little in people development in comparison to other investments they make. The underlying concepts of lean product development have been around since the 1980s, the authors note, when an MIT study found that Japanese automotive companies followed practices that were profoundly different from those of other auto manufacturers. In new product development, lean is about advancing the skills of individuals through technical training and methods of collaboration so that each developer is able to design, develop, and deliver better products and services. Companies can promote individual mastery, in the authors'view, by asking three questions: (1) What do we need to learn about our customers, products, and production processes to design better products? (2) How do we learn this? (3) And what kinds of organizational structures and routines will best support learning? The authors outline several steps companies should take to advance the development of their people. These include making technical mastery an expectation and building it into the reward system and how people work every day, and developing standards and using them.

Challenged by world-class competitors, manufacturing companies in the United States have greatly improved their product development efforts as well as their factory operations. Today, however, U.S. companies are beginning to see the effectiveness of their product development systems plateau. More important, that effectiveness seems to have leveled off far short of the best Japanese companies. The authors, Durward Sobek, assistant professor of engineering at Montana State University, Jeffrey Liker, associate professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, and Allen Ward, head consultant at Ward Systems, explore how one of those companies, Toyota, manages its vehicle development process. Toyota's managerial practices can be grouped into six organizational mechanisms. Three of them are primarily social processes: mutual adjustment, mentoring supervision, and integrative leadership from product heads. The other three are forms of standardization: standard skills, standard work processes, and design standards. Alone, each mechanism would accomplish little, but every piece has its own role and at the same time reinforces the others, unlike many of the sophisticated tools and practices at U.S. companies that tend to be implemented independently. Together, the mechanisms give Toyota a tightly linked product-development system that relies on training and standardization to achieve cross-functional coordination while still building functional expertise. Toyota has added a number of twists to ensure that each project has the flexibility it needs and still benefits from what other projects have learned. This balance allows Toyota to achieve integration across projects and over time, as well as within projects.