Donald (Don) Reinertsen: Cycle Time Reduction Pioneer

Donald  (Don) Reinertsen has made many contributions to improving product development management and cycle time reduction, starting from the early 1980s when Reinertsen was with McKinsey & Co. Developing Products in Half the Time (DPHT) covers several of these:

• Calculating the cost of delay and other project economic tradeoff rules (Chapter 2 of DPHT), which Don Reinertsen originally published in Electronic Business in 1983.

• Appreciating the importance of the fuzzy front end of the product development process (Chapter 3 of DPHT), about which there is an excellent follow-on article by Donald Reinertsen in the 1 November 1999 issue of Research-Technology Management (vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 25-31).

• Understanding that product architecture is where we make strategic decisions that should reflect the development objectives, thus that architectural decisions are too important to leave to the engineers (Chapter 6 of DPHT).

• Using caution in placing gates in a product development process (Chapter 9 of DPHT, and see Don's short, humorous article)

• Shortening the Product Development Cycle
• Faster to Market
• The Strategist's Role in Shortening Product Development
• U. S. Firms Are Finally Getting up to Speed

Don has also published the popular book, Managing the Design Factory, which broadens the cycle time reduction techniques in DPHT to other objectives as well. Reinertsen also shows how the engineering concepts of queuing theory, feedback theory,  and information theory can be applied to manage product development management.

In 2009, Don published The Principles of Product Development Flow, which expands his thinking on project economic analysis, queuing theory, feedback theory,  and information theory. Although much of this material is available elsewhere, he brings it together in a coherent package. This book has been reviewed in the Journal of Product Innovation Management in January 2010 (vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 137–139).

Reinertsen heads a management consulting practice independently of New Product Dynamics. He can be reached at

Donald Reinertsen

Telephone: +1 (310) 373-5332