Joining the Berlin Lean Startup Sprint: Why I'm Starting a Value Stream Mapping Business

I was just accepted into the Lean Startup Sprint at the Berlin Startup Incubator, by the Berlin School of Economics and Law! It will happen at CIC Berlin where they also organize an event for entrepreneurs every Thursday.

Starting a business is hard, and lonely! It’s a struggle to get product-market fit and find the first few customers, so I’m excited to be joining a group of people going through similar experiences and to grow together!

I wanted to share my motivation to apply with you, to keep you in the loop and let you in on why I wanted to start my business. It’s not perfect, and there’s a lot of room for improvement, but that’s part of the journey!

Which Problem do I want to solve and how?

Problem:

Large Enterprise SaaS companies struggle to deliver software at scale. Customer onboarding takes months, causing lost deals. Systems fail to scale to meet customer needs, causing more lost deals. Releases take months, and when they finally ship, they often cause disruptions or bugs. This erodes customer trust and revenue.

The root cause isn’t lack of talent, it’s scale. Teams work in silos, optimizing for local goals, disconnected from how their work fits into the whole. Delivery processes span multiple departments, but there is no structured way to align them around customer value. As a result, leadership struggles with team misalignment and the customer feels the pain. The outcome is wasted effort, missed opportunities, and frustrated teams.

How I solve it:

I use Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and Flow Engineering to bring teams together across engineering, product, and operations. VSM makes the end-to-end delivery process visible, exposes bottlenecks, and enables teams to align on the most impactful improvements.

I combine software engineering, Lean, and facilitation skills to make VSM practical for technology teams. This approach consistently delivers fast wins: reducing release cycles by more than 60%, uncovering root causes of quality issues, and aligning teams and departments around shared goals.

It doesn’t matter what solution gets implemented if it doesn’t move the needle. We might as well take a vacation. VSM helps teams to systematically address persistent challenges in software delivery. It’s a proven, underutilized, high-impact practice that directly improves customer outcomes.

What motivates me to start a business?

What began as a way to grow as an engineer has become my startup. At my previous job at a large SaaS company, I specialized in Value Stream Mapping (VSM), and now I’m building a business to bring this approach to more teams.

I decided to found a startup because I see a gap: technology leaders don’t know about VSM, and when they see the results with other teams, they want to use it, but few people combine the skills needed to apply it in practice: software engineering, Lean, and facilitation.

For me, this is far more rewarding than pure engineering work, because in big organizations the connection between work and customer impact often gets lost. VSM helps teams to realize that connection, and focus on the most impactful problems. That sense of working on the right problem and having real impact is what motivates me personally.

As I facilitated workshops, demand quickly grew. Teams went from monthly to weekly deployments, uncovered root causes of quality issues, aligned entire departments around shared goals, and eliminated hours of manual work each week. The biggest result was clarity: teams finally connected their work to customer value.

The Perfect Timing for VSM

Large Enterprise SaaS companies struggle with delivering software. The software services they sell take herculean efforts to deliver and build upon. Most of that effort, commonly up to 99%, is waste. This is a great fit for VSM.

With AI accelerating how fast we build software, the real bottleneck is how these companies deliver software at scale, which for the foreseeable future is fundamentally human. It depends on people, teams, and collaboration. This requires alignment, clarity and focus. That’s where VSM creates the most impact.