Lean
Definition
Lean is a management philosophy and methodology that focuses on maximizing customer value while systematically eliminating waste — originating in the Toyota Production System and widely adapted for software development, product management, and organizational design.
Lean originated at Toyota in the decades following World War II, developed largely by Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda. The Toyota Production System (TPS) became the model for lean manufacturing worldwide. James Womack and Daniel Jones popularized it for a Western audience in the 1990 book "The Machine That Changed the World," which coined the term "lean production."
The seven wastes (Muda) in lean manufacturing:
- Overproduction — making more than needed
- Waiting — time items sit idle
- Transport — unnecessary movement of materials
- Overprocessing — more work than the customer requires
- Inventory — excess work-in-progress
- Motion — unnecessary movement of people
- Defects — rework and corrections
Lean adapted for software (Mary and Tom Poppendieck):
- Eliminate waste
- Amplify learning
- Decide as late as possible
- Deliver as fast as possible
- Empower the team
- Build integrity in
- See the whole
Lean and agile: Lean and agile share roots. Kanban draws directly from lean manufacturing. Agile's emphasis on eliminating unnecessary process, delivering frequently, and responding to feedback echoes lean principles. Lean Startup applied lean thinking to early-stage product development.
Key lean concepts used in tech teams:
- Value stream mapping — visualizing the end-to-end flow of work to spot waste
- Continuous improvement (Kaizen) — small, frequent process improvements by the people doing the work
- Just-in-time — building only what's needed, when it's needed, in the amount needed
Examples
- Software team maps their value stream and discovers that code review takes 3 days on average — a major waste point
- Product team eliminates a weekly status report that nobody reads — pure waste reduction
- Startup applies lean principle of 'decide as late as possible' — avoids building a full admin panel before validating that enterprise customers want it
- Engineering team runs a Kaizen workshop to improve the build pipeline — reduces deploy time from 45 minutes to 8 minutes
- Hardware company applies lean to software firmware development — reduces batch sizes, ships smaller increments more frequently
Related terms
Snap a lean. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.