Last Lean Coffee of 2024 in Berlin!

lean_coffee_berlin

Thanks again Jonathan Hansen for a great facilitation! After a refreshing morning bike ride through Tiergarten, we sat down to talk about:

  • Re-orgs: how Value Stream Mapping can help
  • Wardley Mapping and Value Stream Mapping: how they compliment each other
  • How to help startups achieve their goals with lean

lean_coffee

Epiphanies

How to Help Startups Achieve Their Goals with Lean

Lean has tools for making sure we’re building what the user pays for, and keeping a check on efficiency by reducing waste (underutilized talent, handoffs, waiting, defects, etc), by getting the most out of human creativity.

The focus here is scaling the business exponentially (deliver more value to more users), while operation costs scale linearly (make sure costs grow slowly), so the gap between profits and costs is wide and grows.

Using validated learning and value stream mapping is great for this.

Re-orgs and Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping can help build trust by putting the focus on improving the system of work. An anti-goal is something like “you’re doing this wrong!”.

The biggest returns on improvements are not at the individual or even at the team level (teams are generally pretty good at improving their own processes), but at the inter-team / value stream level (i.e. where we need improvements is at the leadership level, because leadership owns the system). Showing that to everyone builds trust.

Wardley Mapping and Value Stream Mapping Synergy

A Wardley map can include multiple value streams, and it can help us reason about improvement goals and the Value Streams to focus on. With Value Stream Mapping we can focus on a specific value stream, what are improvement opportunities there and get a roadmap to put them in practice.

wardley

(image from the wardley mapping website, link in the comments)

Discussion Points

  • What thoughts do you have on this?
  • What did I get right and what would you change?
  • What are you curious about?

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