we need to design our systems so that they are continually…

“for those organizations that provided a stock ticker symbol, we found that high performers had 50% higher market capitalization growth over three years. They…

— Gene Kim

“A critical part of the Second Way is making wait times visible, so you know when your work spends days sitting in someone’s queue—or…

— Gene Kim

“when something does go wrong, we conduct blameless post-mortems, not to punish anyone, but to better understand what caused the accident and how to…

— Gene Kim

“Bill Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, quipped that we used to treat servers like pets: “You name them and when they get sick,…

— Gene Kim

“To even get feedback from our integration process would require twenty-four to thirty-six hours.”

— Gene Kim

“work can bounce between teams endlessly due to incomplete information, or work can be passed onto downstream work centers with problems that remain completely…

— Gene Kim

“practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours. And if you want to create a genuine culture of…

— Gene Kim

“habits are what enable mastery.”

— Gene Kim

“20% on detailed planning (Their poor throughput and high lead times were misattributed to faulty estimation, and so, hoping to get a better answer,…

— Gene Kim

“Features are always a gamble. If you’re lucky, ten percent will get the desired benefits.”

— Gene Kim

“I listen to Wes and Patty brainstorm ideas to reduce yet another dependency on Brent when something starts to bother me. Erik called WIP,…

— Gene Kim

The status quo (of development) pre-ordains failure from the very beginning.

— Gene Kim

“high performers were twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals. And,”

— Gene Kim

“we value improvement of our daily work more than daily work itself.”

— Gene Kim

“Alert fatigue is the single biggest problem we have right now…We need to be more intelligent about our alerts or we’ll all go insane.”

— Gene Kim