How I Discovered Value Stream Mapping
A few years ago, I was a frustrated platform engineer watching our customers complain and my team argue in circles.
It was an internal platform team at a large company. The people were great, but the platform… oh boy.
It was hard to use, and every time we deployed we caused problems for our customers.
There were lots of things we could improve, but we couldn’t even agree on what the most important problem to solve was, let alone what the solution should be.
After lots of frustrating team meetings trying to figure this out, I went looking for answers in The DevOps Handbook, where I first came across Value Stream Mapping.
We tried it, and it made a huge difference.
Now we weren’t arguing. We could see what the biggest problems were and their impact. We were able to prioritize problems and come up with solutions — with consensus. 🤯
From there I started doing this for more teams, learning lots of lessons along the way.
Some teams improved deployment times by 60%+.
For others, visualizing the end-to-end flow revealed why they were spending 25–50% of their time firefighting customer issues.
VSM helped these teams find solutions that actually improve customer and org outcomes, instead of initiatives that drain resources and don’t address the most impactful problems for customers and teams.
With growing interest, I jumped the nest and started my business to help teams map their value streams, find their biggest problems, and address them.
If this sounds familiar, let’s talk.