Don is President of Reinertsen & Associates, and the author of three best-selling books on product development. For 30 years he has focused on creating fundamental changes in the way organizations develop products. Before starting his own firm, he had extensive management consulting experience at McKinsey & Co., an international management consulting firm. He also taught executive courses at California Institute of Technology for 15 years and for the last 8 years he has been teaching a popular seminar called Second Generation Lean Product Development.

In 1983 he wrote a landmark article that first quantified the value of development speed, and which has been cited in the frequently quoted McKinsey study that indicated “6 months delay can be worth 33 percent of lifecycle profits.” He coined the term “Fuzzy Front End” and began applying world class manufacturing techniques in product development in 1985. His 1991 book, Developing Products in Half the Time, co-authored with Preston Smith, is a product development classic. His 1997 book, Managing the Design Factory: A Product Developer’s Toolkit, was the first book to describe how the principles of Just-in-Time manufacturing could be applied to product development. In the past 16 years this approach has become known as Lean Product Development.

Don is particularly noted for bringing fresh perspectives and quantitative rigor to development process management. His latest award-winning book, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, has been praised as, “… quite simply the most advanced product development book you can buy.”