The field is maturing. People are starting to figure out what Toyota learned sixty years ago and American manufacturers figured out thirty years ago: process m

The field is maturing. People are starting to figure out what Toyota learned sixty years ago and American manufacturers figured out thirty years ago: process matters. Funny thing about the Agile manifesto, if you read it carefully, they wrote in 2001 (?) that "we've discovered from experience that these things work" (I'm paraphrasing) but they do not say "we have theory to explain why these things work". It turns out that ten years later, we're learning that the reason they work is that they either make the process and its problems visible (Scrum, Kanban) or offer techniques to improve the process (Scrum, XP). Beyond software development, Lean concepts (again adapted from manufacturing) are being applied to entrepreneurship. Why wouldn't an entrepreneur who's read The Lean Startup want someone specifically to focus on the "ops" of his process? I admit that I don't think meal ordering processes are likely to be a meaningful bottleneck, but who can say?