About FLOWCraft
FLOWCraft is a practice for flow-based regulated product development — an approach that brings together systems thinking, Lean-Agile methods, AI, and mandatory compliance into a unified operating model for organizations building safety-critical products.
The core insight is simple: flow is the measure that matters. Not velocity. Not story points. Not ceremony compliance. Flow — the smooth, continuous movement of value through a system from idea to validated product — measured by lead time, cycle time, throughput, and work-in-progress limits.
Most organizations in automotive, aerospace, and medical devices are trapped between two bad options. They can follow heavyweight, document-driven processes that satisfy auditors but destroy speed. Or they can adopt consumer-software Agile patterns that move fast but violate regulatory requirements. FLOWCraft rejects this false choice.
The Lineage
This work stands on the shoulders of specific people and ideas. W. Edwards Deming and his system of profound knowledge — understanding variation, systems, psychology, and the theory of knowledge. Peter Senge and organizational learning — the five disciplines, the system archetypes, the ladder of inference. I worked directly with both at Ford Motor Company in the 1990s as part of the Global Process Leadership Team.
From there: Lean manufacturing principles from Shigeo Shingo via Peter Gaa. Scrum from Ken Schwaber and Ken Rubin. Flow metrics from Daniel Vacanti's Actionable Agile work. And three decades of hands-on regulated product development across six countries and three continents.
Why This Blog Exists
Generic Agile advice from people who've only built web apps is dangerous in regulated industries. Telling a medical device team to "just iterate" when they need design history files and risk management traces isn't empowerment — it's malpractice. Telling an automotive team to "move fast and break things" when functional safety standards require evidence of systematic capability isn't Agile — it's negligent.
This blog exists because the intersection of flow, AI, and compliance is underserved. The Agile community doesn't understand regulated industries. The compliance community doesn't understand flow. And neither understands what AI actually changes about how organizations develop products.
AI doesn't replace your Scrum Master — it eliminates the need for one entirely. It doesn't augment your ceremony-heavy process — it renders the ceremonies unnecessary. The implications for organizational design are profound, and almost nobody is thinking about them clearly.
About David Rush
I'm a thought leader in Industry X Engineering at Accenture, focused on regulated product development across automotive, aerospace & defense, and medical devices. I lead the Americas practice for Codebeamer/ALM and systems-software modeling.
Before that: Ford Technical Scholarship graduate. Design engineer, supervisor, and engineering leadership roles progressing to VP and General Manager across six countries. Founded an electric vehicle startup raising seed capital when the industry was exiting EVs, not entering them. VP at MSC Software leading global industry marketing. Two decades of organizational transformation work.
I've spent 30 years learning one thing: how to make complex product development organizations flow. This blog is where I share what I've learned.
Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit david-rush.com.