NEXUS NEWS
Optimizing Your Product Development with John Drogosz
August 6, 2021
by Cj Pettus
Nexus Lean Product Development instructor John Drogosz saw the value of the Lean methodology when it first grew popular in the United States, and he’s been promoting it ever since.
When John was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, he was introduced to Lean thinking and was immediately intrigued. His interest grew, and he was able to work with renowned Lean expert John Shook during his time at the University. John also saw the benefits of Lean in action through his work on the Ford Production System at the same time.
From those experiences, he began to view the world differently. “As my career progressed as an industrial engineer I saw that a lot of wastes in the manufacturing/supply chain could have been designed out in the product development phase,” John said.
Those observations led John to take action and ultimately resulted in the creation of the Lean Product Development non-credit course. He believed that Lean strategies and tools could decrease time to market, reduce waste, enhance product quality, and more.
With the methodology featured in the course, teams can focus on creating new customer value and designing the future value streams to deliver the value at the lowest total cost throughout the product’s life cycle. Full, cross-functional teams have benefitted from participating in this course. Participants have found success by applying practices from the class at their own companies. Past participants have significantly improved their time to market (a 20-50% increase in development lead times), created better quality products by designing solutions up front, and have had less frustration and wasted effort overall.
Several decades have passed since John first learned of Lean, but his passion for sharing the methodology with others stays strong. As he shared, “The class continues to evolve (and hopefully improve) as the nature of product development continues to change (e.g. virtual work, software/hardware integration, global development teams, etc.).”
Learn more and register for the next Lean Product Development offering.