Agile Hardware Development

Incremental vs. disruptive development

December 8, 2025December 8, 2025 Oliver Schönfeld

Why Organizations End Up in Disruptive Development Cycles — The Real Causes Despite the clear benefits of incremental approaches, many organizations end up planning large disruptive rewrites. The common causes are not strategic brilliance, but: Premature release of a poor-quality product When organizations push an MVP into production before it is structurally ready—missing features, poor…

Repetitive and fixed length iterations in hardware development

November 4, 2025November 4, 2025 Oliver Schönfeld

The following statements and questions come up very often when introducing agility and Scrum in hardware development: Every work package is different in length and that cannot be predicted! We have so many dependencies on suppliers and cannot predict delivery times. Our work packages are much larger than 4 weeks. If anything, our iterations would…

Is there an agile milestone process?

November 22, 2022June 10, 2023 Oliver Schönfeld 4 Comments

Since the use of agile practices in physical product development, the question has arisen as to whether classic product development methods can or should be completely replaced, used alongside one another, or combined. Behind this is primarily the desire of organizations to retain processes that have already been introduced for the most part, or not…

Modern interdisciplinary organizational setups

November 7, 2021May 18, 2022 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

In organization theory, a distinction is made between the organizational structure and the process organization. In classical organizations the department structure corresponds to the organizational line structure, whereby these form usually functional units and summarize thus specialized coworkers (e.g. sales, production)*. The classical expiration organization is regulated thereby either over work processes, which regulate the…

Agility vs. Engineering

May 3, 2020October 30, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

Is agile product development and the application of engineering practices a contradiction, can they be combined or do they even complement each other? In this article we want to investigate this question.

Version 1 launched! Our scaled agile development framework for physical products

April 22, 2020May 1, 2020 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

The P4-Dev framework describes a new type of organizational structure for companies that develop physical products. Together with its sister framework P4-Ops for operational business, it describes a holistic operating system for product creation in modern organizations that implement the principles of lean, agility and New Work. Version 1 has now been launched in German…

Gap Mapping: Transparency and Structure of Product Developments

September 14, 2019April 10, 2023 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

In discussing what product development actually is, I like to argue that product development is the “management of uncertainty.” Unfortunately, many believe that it will only be possible to reach their goal with a detailled plan, that will only be executed. Such plans are often requested by management, so that only then a project may…

Why I favour Knowledge Gaps over Hypotheses

February 3, 2019April 9, 2023 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

Hypothesis is a term and concept used by Eric Ries’ Lean Startup. The idea behind it is that the organization confirms or disproves one or more (business) assumptions as quickly as possible. Quote from Eric Ries on 4 common misconceptions about lean startup: “I hate the idea of failing fast. It’s like I’m trying to…

Better innovations under pressure, deadlines and conflicting goals

January 26, 2019October 30, 2021 Oliver Schönfeld Leave a comment

How does deadline pressure affect the quality of results? I often experience project teams being formed with the goal of developing innovative new ideas and technologies under pressure. In order to give the team a sense of urgency and to get results as soon as possible, management sets tight time limits.

Differences in the development of physical and IT & service products

October 28, 2018April 10, 2023 Oliver Schönfeld 1 Comment

When introducing agile frameworks and methods, I often hear that agile working in the development of physical products is not possible. I agree that some extensions are useful or even necessary, but the principles are very applicable. So, in this article, I’d like to take a closer look at the differences between the realities of…