The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
My Agile team lacks clarity about the company's direction, and collaboration with leaders is poor. How can value stream mapping help me with Steve Pereira, Founder/CEO at Visible
Focus. Clarity. Collaboration. These are all things many agile teams struggle with when attempting to work with company leaders. Old ways linger, and muddy the waters for lasting change. Fortunately, Steve Pereira, our guest in this episode, stopped by to discuss value stream mapping, and how it can shed some light on these issues. If you want to move out of complicated chaos, and into delivering real value that customers will actually use, then take a listen in as we discuss. It's really about tweaks to behaviors that can have the greatest impacts!
More about Steve:
Steve has been obsessed with process, optimization, and visual learning his whole life. Over his long and varied career in tech he came to realize Value Streams are the key focus to unlock team alignment, velocity, value, and sustainability. Paired with DevOps principles he has created an incredible toolset for continuous improvement. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
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Bold from simple and get as complicated as is valuable to you, but it doesn't have to be complicated. And when I started out doing it, it was really super basic and I was getting fantastic results with my team. And I've kept that, uh, you know, I haven't really made this more complex over time because I want people to be doing it right. I want it to be, I can't, I can't say that this exercise to eliminate friction is going to be full of friction and waste. Right? So, um, I think what I would encourage people to do is check out some of the more recent material on value stream mapping, uh, because it's, it's really been repurposed for software in very productive ways. It's a lot simpler than people might think. It's a lot more fun to do this activity with teams. Then they might think it's not about finding waste in terms of people that we can let go or people that we can move to different departments. It's about the things that slow everyone down that make them feel like they're just going through the motions or that they have to deal with friction and toil in their job and freeing us up to be more creative. It's really the opposite of manufacturing. It's the opposite of robotic activities. It's maximizing our opportunities to be creative. So that's what I want to leave people with is that this is a way for us to free ourselves from the parts of work that we like, the least that we want to get rid of, that we want to do, uh, as little as possible so that we have more time to be creative, to be collaborative, to, to appreciate our teams, to appreciate our place in the value stream. Um, value stream mapping really kicks that off and it builds this, it bootstraps and builds. This momentum of everything is getting better all the time. You know, we're actually making a difference. We're actually, uh, delivering value to our customers. All of this makes sense to go back to your earlier point about, you know, I don't want to just be doing work and I wonder what all this is for the value stream gives you the model that makes it real. That makes the whole reason your company exists. The whole, uh, goal of satisfying your customers makes it real for your, your work and the work of your teams and your organizations.
Speaker 2:[inaudible], [inaudible] welcome to the podcast that challenges you from the inside
Speaker 3:And discover the agile within. And now here's your host, Greg Miller. All right. Welcome back to another episode of the agile within. So today we are speaking with, uh, Steve Pereira on mapping value stream mapping. How mapping can bring knowledge from the team and how mapping value stream mapping can help drive behavior. Welcome to the show. Steve, thanks
Speaker 1:Very much. It's wonderful to be here.
Speaker 3:So, uh, for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, Steve for Eric, go ahead and maybe introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us what, uh, what you're all about.
Speaker 1:Sure, thanks. So, uh, I've been in tech for quite a while, uh, over 20 years now. And I actually started in tech support, uh, at IBM. Um, I mean, fun fact before that I started in computer animation, but then I moved into nice, uh, tech, uh, directly. And I've been through a bunch of roles along the software development value stream through kind of build and release engineering. Um, it management, uh, software development systems, engineering, uh, uh, agency models where I was consulting, uh, with another company. And then just before starting visible, I was a CTO of a fast-growing startup, uh, in the, uh, wireless and telecom space.
Speaker 3:Nice. So tell, tell us a little bit about your company visible. You are the founder CEO.
Speaker 1:Yes. Uh, so visible was started, um, after my last job, I looked back on my career and all the things that I'd seen and all the challenges that I had worked through and the common thread was, um, this idea, that process drives a lot of what we do. And, um, I started to see this, this idea that companies and every part of every company, and especially being a CTO of a startup, you, you get to see a lot of a company. You get to see sales, marketing, success, all these different things coming together. And a lot of them started to look the same to me. A lot of, they had a lot of the same challenges that had a lot of challenges related to flow, and a lot of challenges related to visibility. Like a lot of people didn't know what was going on. They didn't know that they should be focusing their time and so visible, uh, pulls from some education that I got along my career on value streams and traditional manufacturing, uh, practices, um, that come out of car manufacturing and Toyota 50, 60 years ago, and value stream mapping was really how they looked at processes and tried to find improvements and tried to find abilities or opportunities to improve the flow of value through organizations. And I think that that's something that everyone can use everywhere. And it just seemed like this hidden knowledge that, uh, so many teams and companies and individuals could benefit from knowing more about and having very clear, uh, strategies to leverage.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I, uh, yeah. Let's, I want to dig into that, uh, the idea of clarity that you mentioned, because I can totally identify with that. I'm sure a lot of folks can. And, um, I know at companies I've been to, you know, they try to have this idea of, you know, a visible maybe, um, strategy or direction, you know, strategies starts with, uh, the, the top, the executives, the CEO and filters on down. But what I've seen a lot of times is, um, siloed strategy. Like each, each department, each VP has their own individual strategies and it doesn't always seem to map up to the, to the company strategy. And you're exactly right. I, um, I'm a scrum master. Uh, I've been in it for an agile scrum for 11 years and, uh, I struggle a lot even now to figure out what the heck is our strategy, what are we trying to do here? And work just seems to come throwing, throwing work at us. Where's this coming from? How does this fit in? Uh, well, you know, this executive says to do it, Oh, okay. I guess this is what we're doing. Right. But it doesn't, I don't see it on our, uh, product owner as I've been talking about it. He's certainly not, you know, not, uh, it seems to be thrown him for a loop here. So too. So, um, how do, how does your value stream mapping helps us with clarity?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that there is, there's a lot of, uh, different
Speaker 4:Fast,
Speaker 1:So it's to clarity and organizations that, you know, that sort of clarity of strategy that you're alluding to is very important. Right? It's, it's very difficult to get people aligned if they can't see more than six inches in front of their face. Right. I mean, how are they going to line up? What are they heading towards? What's the North star? Uh, what is the context for these things like context matters to human beings, right? We can't just robotically execute orders unless we are part of a military that, I mean, people say that military people can just get things done, but th and that's not to say that there's not there. There's not a shared vision or shared understanding. There there's a ton of shared understanding and there's a ton of context. Um, they just separate what, you know, what's productive to know from what is noise, uh, relative to the signal, right? Um, in an organization without, you know, a huge military structure and all of this prior training and all of this built in alignment, asking people to do things without context is a disaster for morale. And, and, um, it's a disaster for outcomes too, because if I don't know what the North star is, I'm going to be guessing I'm going to be second guessing all the time. And that means I'm going to go slow if I even make any forward progress at all. But from a process perspective, it's a little bit different. What we're looking at with clarity of a value stream is we're doing these repeated activities all the time, right? We have this value stream that our team is charged with providing to customers, knowing what that looks like means that we know where the challenges are. We know where the bottlenecks are, and we know where investing in flow and investing in quality or investing in velocity is going to pay off. We're not just trying to automate everything for, for one thing. We're able to target our efforts at what is going to make the biggest difference. And that has really profound effects on people because we see more progress that way, right? We see this cause and effect. We see tighter feedback loops when we're working on things that make a difference. And the other piece of the clarity puzzle is in the value stream. There's many, many people, there's people upstream of me and there's people downstream of me. There's people who are affecting my work because they come earlier in the process. And there's people who I'm affecting by my work, who come later in the process. And so seeing the value stream and seeing that I'm a part of this, and here's my relationship to it adds this clarity of, uh, team inclusion and empathy for, you know, that everyone has to just deal with what comes to them from earlier in time. Right. Uh, so I think that that is a big revolution for teams that I work with. A lot of people that, you know, don't realize that because we are not thinking about that and we can't see it on a regular basis and a value stream mapping exercise is a really great way to step away from our daily work and see really what's going on. What does this all look like if we're going to invest time and energy and resources in making improvements, where should that happen? And to what degree should that happen? And what should it look like? These are things that people just usually guess at, or they try to come to consensus, right? And it takes forever to make a decision on what should we do, but a value stream that makes it very clear. It's a few hours and you go from, I have no idea what's going on to, right. If we do this, this is what's going to happen.
Speaker 3:Correct. Yeah. I love it. So when you do excuse me, when you go into a company, um, I would, I would venture to guess that you personally don't work with individual teams, maybe I'm wrong. Um, but do you, do you, do you work with, um, maybe executives and then like, if I'm on a team, a lot of listeners, uh, will are going to be on to this podcast are going to be probably scrum masters or people on a team. Um, what does that look like to them when you do the exercise, do you go through it, uh, with me on a team? And then, uh, along with that, um, when you leave, is there like a map, uh, op that I can see daily, a dashboard that I can see so I can remember what, what our vision is, or maybe help help me through that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a, that's a great clarification to have. Um, it's all of those things in short and I'll, I'll explain all of it. So when I come into a company, it's usually, usually I'm brought in by an executive because teams don't usually have discretionary budget for process improvement or process innovation, which is a shame. But, uh, that's usually the reality is that an executive asked to feel the pain or see the opportunity and then involve their teams, but we always start high. And then we zoom in because, uh, we don't want, we don't want, and what, you know, what we're trying to work against that usually happens as micro optimization, right. Focusing too closely on something that doesn't really matter because it's not the real bottleneck. It's, we're not zooming out far enough to see the big picture. So we start with the big picture and then we zoom in. And what that usually looks like is from a leadership level, what they are concerned about is the release process typically. So what happens when all the teams are collecting their work and we're trying to get something out to customers, and then we usually zoom into specific teams. So I'll work with a scrum team on their process as it relates to the big picture. Uh, especially if that's where we've seen bottlenecks or opportunities. You know, if, if we have a team that has a goal of going from a six month releases down to two week releases or one week releases, whatever their target is, um, what happens is, you know, you can optimize the release, but you're going to have to optimize the scrum as well, because there's probably a lot of friction there. And you can't just say go faster, right? You have to look at, okay, what's, what's holding this team back. W why isn't this reality today? And that's what the value stream mapping really does well, is it shows people, um, what's happening by illustrating all the activities involved, all of the timing in terms of measurement. But also we can look at quality of quality is a concern because you want to tighten things up. Quality might suffer if you're just trying to go faster, right? So we want to make sure that we've shored up quality and made sure that nothing's falling through the cracks. Um, so we'll map the value streams together so that everyone gets that visual representation. Um, but you hit on a really great point, um, about what, what is this picture that they look at every day, and that is starting to become value stream management. And that's an early field that's coming out of app application, lifestyle, or lifecycle management, which is an old thing, um, which has been around for a long time. But nowadays we have this ability to plug into all kinds of tools and get data and show people real-time performance or regular performance on what's the flow of work. Uh, what does it look like? Where is it? Where's it piling up? Where is it, uh, where are we seeing challenges? So that's where things are going to kind of compliment the map. The map pulls information and ideas and insights out of people's heads and puts it together so that everyone has the same understanding. And that's kind of really valuable in isolation then on a regular basis to kind of maintain that momentum and build on it and reinforce the feedback loop of flow matters, constraints matter bottlenecks matter, uh, the flow of value is something that we need to pay attention to on a regular basis. And something like value stream management can work really well for that. But you can also just pull those metrics out of JIRA. You can look at a ma a JIRA dashboard. That'll tell you a lot of that. Uh, I've also seen teams just do it in a spreadsheet. You know, I've had scrum masters just measure in a spreadsheet because that was the, the easiest thing to do the lowest effort, highest return way to keep the momentum going. Right. Um, and then what you do is you revisit the value stream map every three to six months, because the moment you see the map, you're going to start changing things, right? So the map, the map change in Sioux, changing the terrain, right? We're not talking about geography here. So when we're mapping workflow, the map changes the moment that we start to make improvements. So we come back to it and we remap, and that's a much easier exercise once you've done it once. Um, and usually there's, you know, I'm not doing those repeated mapping sessions. That's a capability that the team adopts and they start doing it themselves. Sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. That sounds awesome. So, um, you say a scrum masters key, the scrum masters would, you know, if they choose to display it to the team in the team room, that would be up to them as, uh, as far as, um, as far as that goes. So, but the teams involved, correct from the point when it reaches the team to the update, uh, I know when they, when you leave, they are, but when they first go through it as the entire team involved, like if I'm in a scrum team, am I involved in it?
Speaker 1:Usually, yes. Um, what we want in a value stream mapping session is enough people, but not too many people. So we want representation from every part of the value stream, uh, which usually means, you know, if you've got a reasonably sized scrum team, we'll say six to 10 people, even 12 people can be, can be acceptable for that. You're including everybody is still productive. You know, you hit challenges with too many chefs in the kitchen. Once you go sort of beyond 15 people, it gets really challenging to get everyone's insights, get everyone's input and tie all those people up for, you know, a couple of hours to do mapping. So in cases where the extremely large teams, or maybe a release process, like higher level, what you want is just representation. So you probably want two voices from each specific, uh, activity in the value stream. Okay. What's really important in beyond the scrum team at the scrum level is some leadership, right? Some executive, someone who can make decisions on yes, let's spend some time working on that. Um, let's, let's invest in some automation, let's invest in some tooling, let's invest in some training. So you want someone who can maybe put some funding behind specific initiatives, because when you do value stream mapping, you'll discover you immediately discover opportunities to save about 20% of your workflow. Uh that's because we just don't look at it, right? So it's just sitting there. Once you look at it, you see these opportunities. And so that's about one day a week for a scrum team that they get back. And that means that they don't need extra investment to spend time on further improvements. So it's a great way to kind of bootstrap the efforts and get things kind of growling after you do a mapping session, which is fantastic. Like I like going into a team and saying, here's your top three opportunities. PS, if you do this one tomorrow, you're going to get time to do the other two. And this is not going to cost you any time. It's not going to cost you any extra effort. Uh, this is free for you essentially, right? Cause you're saving time. So that is fantastic. But you know, as you get into the higher level, like the release process, uh, you probably have to coordinate some things you probably want to invest in something like a value stream management solution. Um, so you want leadership to be involved to kind of support that, but also you want them to know that these things are happening too, right? You don't want these teams to kind of labor away and improve and not have any positive effects in the larger organization. Right. If we are making massive improvements, we want leadership to know so that they can, you know, spread this out to other teams, right. Get other teams to do it. And, um, we want them to know that their efforts are actually getting results. And because that builds this momentum, right? It, it creates this machine of continuous improvement. So it's really important to have leadership in so that people feel comfortable spending the time and that they maybe have some cover to do that, to invest in that. But also if there's, if there's things where, you know, we need to make a case for moving people around, uh, we need a case to split this team into two teams. We need a case to invest in some tooling or automation or a dashboard. Um, those that are, you know, the people who write the checks are really important to be including in that process.
Speaker 3:Right. So, so this person would be, so you've come in done your thing. And the three months later, as you said, this happens again, you would have that person, uh, continually at this meeting someone at level to, to make those decisions. Correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think, you know, leadership really likes to be involved in these things because they don't know what's happening on the ground. Just as much as the, you know, the individual contributor stone, like they, everyone can see their piece. Right. And, uh, the leadership usually is staying at a higher level. They can't see you what's happening in the trenches. And what that happens is, or what that ultimately results in is this lack of empathy and understanding, um, because it's very hard to, to kind of trust without any verification, right. If you're just saying, well, you know, I'm just gonna take my hands off the wheel and, and hope that all of this is great. Um, that's fantastic in a high trust environment and it's necessary in a high trust environment, but how do you get to that level of trust? And you get to that level of trust by, by showing your work and showing evidence that, you know, we're making good decisions. We have good systems, uh, we have a productive process. We're doing what we can, and here's how we're continually getting better. That goes a long way to kind of connect this, this divide, if there's a divide. And there usually is between leadership and these, uh, feature teams or product teams or scrum teams.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I like, I like the, um, what I've heard all along the way that word that keeps coming to my mind is collaboration. That behavior that, um, you're meeting with someone who has controls the purse strings and the team and the team has seen their, uh, their value map there. And each team member, I would imagine has a voice and is allowed to input. And I've been on a lot of teams where it's, it's funny. So there, you know, you think, okay, you think some, sometimes, you know, developers, they just want to sit behind a keyboard and just code. And, uh, you know, the overall stereotype is that they don't care what they're working on. They just want to sit there with their headphones on, right. And drink mountain Dew and write and write and work on code. I got a big eye-opener on, on some teams where it's like, uh, we're working on something and they come to me and they say, Hey, why are we doing this? You know, I I'm, I'm coding all day long and, uh, that's good. But, um, I had, I can S I can picture this person in my head was like, I'm coding. I don't want to, I don't want to feel like I'm doing something, um, that has no value basically, that I'm doing something that, uh, just because someone told me to do it. What's why are we doing this? And that was great. And, and I realized, uh, the, the PO did not have like a, uh, I don't know what you would call like a charter or something that, you know, like the reason why we're doing this. So he was like, yeah, that's a good point. He quick, he quick a quick, but he came up with something and we showed it to the team. And that helped right there, that our reason to be, this is our reason to be, this is the value we're doing. This is why you're doing these stories. This is why you're coding every day. And I had it occur on some other teams too. And I realized, wow, not everybody out there is just coming to work every day, just coding and going home. Like sometimes some typical executives might think, right? Oh, they don't care what they're working on. Now they do. They actually did.
Speaker 1:You're touching on a really critical piece there. And it's, you know, a lot of times we forget about people think about technical folks, and they think that out of autonomy, mastery and purpose, they're just care. They just care about mastery, but everyone cares. The whole reason for that insight is that everyone cares about autonomy, mastery and purpose. And it's this kind of like, it's another iron triangle, right? You cannot sacrifice on any of those things. If you want people to stay happy and productive and doing their best work. Uh, so that's, that's really, really critical. But I think that that's another real big strength of the value stream as opposed to process improvement. Right? A lot of people talk about process improvement and they have this allergic reaction to it. And everyone hates thinking about process and, and doing any work that involves process, because it seems like this just dead end of drudgery and, uh, this robotic activity. But when, when you put it in the context of a value stream and the customer is always there at the end and value is always present, then all of a sudden we're reframing process improvement to be something that is valuable, right? It is it's affecting the big picture. It's affecting why we come to work every single day. It's putting it in the right context where, you know, value is a first class citizen in this process. It's re it's really the most important part. And I think that makes a big difference, right? There's people lose sight of value in the concept of value. It's very easy to, especially when we get into the process, when we get used to what we're doing on a daily basis, we, you know, our mind naturally focuses on that rather than the big picture. We can't keep all these things in our heads all the time. So the value stream mapping, exercise pulls people out of that day to day, blinders on tunnel vision and says, well, it's great what we're doing on a regular basis, but let's remember that it's in the service of customers, whether those are internal customers or external customers, and that's really, really valuable. And it, it shows that we don't do this on a regular basis because most of our features that we create are not used by our customers. Right. And, and 90% of our processes in, in business and information and knowledge work are waste. So we have a long way to go with this. Um, and it's because we're not doing things like value stream mapping on a regular basis.
Speaker 3:It's depressing the stats really like, I'm just like, Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's like lots of room for
Speaker 1:Improvement. It's positive. It's positive. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, it's funny when you set. So whenever I see stats like that, it's so like, I'll be going along, you know, um, working at a company and, and, you know, even on social media use here, you know, everybody everybody's into agile, everybody's a scrum master, you know, um, I get this, maybe it's just me. I get this thing in my head where, you know, it's everywhere by now. Everyone's doing it. What, what, what room is there left to help people? And then I hear stats like that and like, Oh my gosh, we have such a long way to go. No, even though agile has been around in by name, you know, agile manifesto is 20 years old this year by name, since they named it, we've been doing it since then. But even in the 25, 30 years, maybe longer than it's actually been, been going on. But even that, in that amount of time, there's still quite a long way to go. There's still quite a lot of companies out there that are, uh, trying it, failing, trying it, failing again, um, resistant, working in waterfall. Uh, what have you, right.
Speaker 1:And it's easy to, it's easy to interrogate those, those statistics, because if, even if they're old, right. I mean, 90% of business processes are waste that's. Um, Jeffrey liker is the guy who wrote the Toyota way. And I think that that was in the eighties or nineties, but why would, why would that, why would that statistic have changed, right? What is the, what are we doing differently now that we weren't doing back then? And, you know, we have things like dev ops that are removing some friction, but not necessarily helping us make better product decisions. It's not necessarily connecting us with customers. It's not necessarily getting us more feedback or higher quality feedback is not introducing systems by which we make better decisions on what to build and what those things look like. So, you know, maybe we've gone from 90% to 80%, but you know, that that's a, that's a tiny improvement and there's still a long way to go. Uh, and it comes from, you know, really looking at what is really involved in what we're doing now. It's well beyond agile itself, the boundaries of software development it's well beyond the boundaries of agile plus dev ops, because product is involved. Steering is involved, portfolios are involved, finance is involved marketing success. Um, we have this gigantic, like the real value stream is larger than we've imagined. Uh, we've been focused on, okay, well, tech is this little part here. And then we hand it off. And the, the, those handoffs are really just like chasms, where there's tons of waste. There's tons of contexts lost. There's tons of misunderstanding. There's tons of misalignment. And really by looking at the whole end to end value stream from, we need to do something to great. We got money from customers for doing the thing that they wanted us to do that involves the whole company, right. It involves talent across the org chart and across the organization. And we haven't even begun to realign ourselves to that reality. Like we're not structuring our teams to fit this model, um, because we haven't even seen it yet.
Speaker 3:Right. So as you're talking there, and as you've been talking earlier that another word that's coming to my mind as a, the scrum value of focus, and I can imagine this comes up quite a bit and in what you do when you're talking about value stream and driving out waste. Um, and this is one question that kind of always, uh, intrigues me. Why, in your opinion, the companies you've been dealing with, you know, companies, companies are made up of people obviously, but why do you think it is so difficult for human beings to focus on a product focus on one thing, you know, in order to do your value stream mapping, you have to focus, uh, I would imagine quite a bit to, to look at the waste and, and change and drive that out. Why do you think it's so tempting and we still want to do more than one thing at a time?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I think that, that, that's, that's, I really liked that question. Um, I think it's very natural for us to focus on what we're doing, first of all right. I mean, and what are we doing? We're doing individual activities, uh, because we're not a hive mind, right? We can't, we can't have the personalities and the consciousness and the awareness of our entire team in our heads while we're doing our work, we have to be ourselves, which means working within the context that we are most comfortable with. Um, and that reinforces itself, right? I mean, if, if it feels comfortable for me to ignore a bunch of things that are, uh, hazy or I don't really understand very well, um, I'm going to conserve energy and I'm going to feel happier doing my work by saying all those things. Like it's a little beyond my understanding. I'm just going to focus on this thing that I know really well, which is, um, you know, my favorite tool, my favorite framework, my favorite way to build something, my favorite type of feature, all of these things. They get personal very quickly. And because we can't have our entire team, we can have our entire organization taking up room in our brains all the time. We also can't have our customers taking up room in our brains all the time. Although we'd like to think that we can and product folks, I think really tried to do this really, um, really hard. But, you know, you run into another challenge where you don't have one customer, you know, you have different personas, you have different individuals. And so everything sort of becomes a proxy of reality. And you have a archetypical customer that you have to put in your brain every time you want to make a decision about a customer outcome. All of this is exhausting, right? So no wonder we don't do it, and we don't have good systems to help us do it too, to help us switch from, okay. I just focused on doing my work, but at this moment or three times a week, what I'm going to do is switch into my customer brain. And here's how I'm going to do that. Right? I'm going to, I'm going to follow this system, this playbook that takes me out of my brain and puts me into the customer brain. And that would be super productive, right. For everyone to do. We don't have any of those tools. As far as I know, one thing we do have is value stream mapping, which puts us in the team context, the organizational context very easily, very quickly and very effectively. So it takes us from I'm doing my work to what are we doing? What is the work that we're doing? And you can zoom that out to whatever level is productive. So it can be at the team level. It could be, um, two people, right? I mean, it could be someone that you work very closely with. You can build a value stream map that eliminates the friction between you and we don't do that. Of course, that's probably not the most effective way to do it. But what I'm trying to say is you can zoom this in or out as much as you, like, you can make a value stream map for yourself. You know, if, if you're really into your morning routine, you can build a value stream map for your morning routine and you can, you can tune the hell out of it and make it incredibly efficient. But where we really start to see huge returns is at the team level and at the organizational level, because it does require us to pull ourselves out of focus and refocus, because if we're focused anywhere, this is the whole, the whole message of lean, the whole message of value stream mapping and management is if we're focused anywhere. But our biggest bottleneck, we are wasting our time. And that I think is a, it's a very profound message that we need to be reminded of. Right. And even if we know it, we need to be reminded of it because it's so comfortable. It's so efficient for us to just put on blinders and focus on what we think is moving the needle.
Speaker 3:Right. Right. Yeah. When you were talking there, I was funny. I, I, I have a story when I was, um, I was working at a startup back in the early two thousands. Um, talking about focusing and focusing on your customers. Um, we were trying to grow obviously and trying to get customers. So, and we were trying to get this one, one big customer, like a big fish for us that would, that would like put us on the map. So, um, we had someone go out there, meet with them, talk with them, say, well, you know what, in our product was a SAS, uh, would we have to do, you know, in order to make you happy. And so he came back with a notebook and guess what? We focused, we did everything that they wanted to do on the website. Capabilities went back to them. They loved it. And they joined keep on going down the process. Right. Uh, adding, adding customers. So customers, uh, other customers that we were getting were like, didn't like some of those things, or didn't find it useful. So we made some changes and guess what the other customer, the big fish was like, Hey, Hey, wait a second. What are you doing here? Uh, we don't like that. So we kinda robbed Peter to pay Paul, I guess, however you want to say kind of, you know, and I think a lot of companies do that, right? We got that big fish customer. It's going to make, put us on the map completely not thinking about, I mean, this could be good or bad. We focused, right. We did what we had to do to make it better for this one giant customer. However, we kind of didn't fail to realize, Oh, you know, they're not, they're not going to keep us in existence. We still need other customers, but then we make changes and listen to them and then it upsets them. So I thought it was kind of interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The, the thing that this reminds me of is something that's been in my head for a couple of weeks. Um, and it's this idea that product innovation gets you a wish. You know, if you're thinking of like a genie and a magic lamp product, innovation is going to get you one wish, right? Like let's, I want a specific outcome. Wish granted, you, you have the thing that's fantastic that somebody wants, but that's one wish. And for you to repeat that and scale that, which is what we need, we need to be finding these innovations all the time. We need to be finding what our customers want and not necessarily by asking them, you need the thing that they're asking for without asking for it, right. The thing that they need, they want, which isn't usually what they're asking for because they, you know, we don't really understand these things. We have, we, we haven't really turned it around in our heads when we ask for something. Um, and we're not sure of what the, you know, the larger opportunity is. But when I think of process innovation, it's like wishing for more wishes, like what you get out of process innovation is the ability to satisfy those wishes on a more continuous, rapid, uh, constructive and productive way. So that you're getting that feedback. You're able to ship those changes. You're able to pivot towards what your customers want and perhaps satisfy everyone by creating, uh, features and improvements that maybe some of your customers can turn on and other ones can turn off, uh, introducing choice, introducing different profiles, different tiers of your product, all of that needs process innovation, because it means that you need to be doing these things. You need to be cranking out this work because 90% of it is going to be, you know, it's going to upset somebody and there's some happy medium, but you've gotta be delivering so that you can separate the, the true insights, the true value from just work that, that, you know, from hypotheses that you're, you're pushing out into the world. And, uh, and I think that something that really resonates with me in the product space is this idea of like, and I'm gonna butcher it because it's not clear in my head, but it's like, um, something about like create a thousand things and kill off 999 of them, right? Like we need the ability to create tons and tons of work because we don't know what's going to work well. And we don't know, what's really going to resonate with people. We get better, but the way that you get better is getting feedback and you have to get something out in order to get feedback, uh, whether it's a finished product or a concept, or, you know, uh, uh, an MVP, but the process gives you that ability. Like you can't get feedback if you're not getting anything out to get things out. Um, it's great to do it once, but what you need to be doing is you need to be doing this constantly. And that's where I think DevOps has really been an enabler from a technology standpoint to enable that consistent and high velocity delivery of work so that we can get the feedback that's going to inform doing the right thing, because just doing isn't enough. Um, we're not going to get it right the first time.
Speaker 3:No, no, totally exactly. Well, yeah. Anything else about value stream mapping, Steve, that, um, we didn't touch on yet that you think would be important for us to know?
Speaker 1:Um, well, what I can do, what I'd love to do is share some, uh, some links in the show notes, because one thing about value stream mapping is that it comes from traditional manufacturing. It comes from a factory model and a lot of people will either respond to that in a couple of different ways. They'll say, Oh, this comes from manufacturing. This doesn't apply to software. Thank you. Goodbye. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, bill. Also, the curious folks will go to maybe something like a Wikipedia or Google. And what they're going to get back is a lot of material on value stream mapping from a manufacturing perspective, which is also not very helpful. It's very complex in its origins, and it's not very productive in a software or a truly like knowledge based software development context. So what I've been doing is basically extracting the 20% of value stream mapping that delivers 80% of the value. And trying to present that material back to folks and say, it's, you don't have to, um, you know, have a six Sigma education. You don't have to have an MBA to do this. Uh, it can be very simple and you can build from simple and get as complicated as is valuable to you, but it doesn't have to be complicated. And when I started out doing it, it was really super basic and I was getting fantastic results with my team. And I've kept that, uh, you know, I haven't really made this more complex over time because I want people to be doing it right. I want it to be, I can't, I can't say that this exercise to eliminate friction is going to be full of friction and waste. Right? So, um, I think what I would encourage people to do is check out some of the more recent material on value stream mapping, uh, because it's, it's really been, uh, repurposed for software in very productive ways. It's a lot simpler than people might think. It's a lot more fun to do this activity with teams than they might think. It's not about finding waste in terms of people that we can let go or people that we can move to different departments. It's about the things that slow everyone down that make them feel like they're just going through the motions or that they have to deal with friction and toil in their job and freeing us up to be more creative. It's really the opposite of manufacturing. It's the opposite of robotic activities. It's maximizing our opportunities to be creative. So that's what I want to leave people with is that this is a way for us to free ourselves from the parts of work that we like, the least that we want to get rid of, that we want to do, uh, as little as possible so that we have more time to be creative, to be collaborative, to, to appreciate our teams, to appreciate our place in the value stream. Um, value stream mapping really kicks that off and it builds this, it bootstraps and builds. This momentum of everything is getting better all the time. You know, we're actually making a difference. We're actually, uh, delivering value to our customers. All of this makes sense to go back to your earlier point about, you know, I, I don't want to just be doing work and I wonder what all this is for the value stream gives you the model that makes it real. That makes the whole reason your company exists, the whole, uh, goal of satisfying your customers makes it real for your, your work and the work of your teams and your organizations.
Speaker 3:Yeah. As you were very well said, thank you. I, as you were talking through that, I was thinking, um, I've gone through some value mapping exercises before. And some of those, um, the creativity you were talking about, some of those things that you want to get rid of, uh, uh, I've seen maps where, uh, things like, um, sending an email, waiting for a response, you know, send it to the supervisor or, you know, wait, you know, it's, it shows you, you know, I'm sure you've done this before. You know, I send an email and I wait a week for a response from the supervisor because he's out on vacation. I don't realize that. Or, um, he's involved in some other priorities that the work I'm working on is not his priority. So he doesn't get back to me right away, but I'm waiting for a week to get a response to. And I think what you're getting at is a creative way to maybe not send that email, maybe, uh, find something that's going to get that answer quicker. Um, and I liked that a lot. I, I, that gives the creativity to the team. Uh, it helps them find solutions. So really appreciate your time. How can folks get ahold of you? There may be some, uh, maybe some executives listening to this right now and they want to, uh, they like what you had to say, want to get in touch with you. How can they get in touch with you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would love to have conversations with folks about challenges or goals, or even just curiosity about what all this is about. Um, through my website, visible dot I S um, S as in Sam, uh, I've got a contact form on there, but, um, my email address is Steve at visible dot S as well. And that goes directly to me. So I love to hear from anyone who's, uh, you know, curious about what goes beyond this podcast and what is what's involved in getting started with this? Um, there's a lot that they can do on their own too. You know, you don't need to hire me to get value from value stream mapping, uh, but I'm happy to help kick things off and get people moving in the right direction.
Speaker 3:Great. Awesome. So we've been talking with Steve Pereira, founder, C E O at visible, uh, located in Toronto, Canada. Thank you very much, Steve, for your conversation today on value stream mapping and how we can get more out of it, how it can help drive PA behavior around clarity, process improvements, all that good stuff. So, once again, this is Greg. Go ahead and reach out to me, Greg Miller, the agile within any questions, comments on this show or any other episode that you may have show suggestions, always open to that. Reach out to me on social media. I'm all over social media set for YouTube, not on there yet. Um, please go ahead and like this on any and subscribe on any of the podcast apps you have. I'm available on every single podcast app out there. Thanks for listening. This has been Greg at the agile within where we help you to be more agile.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Greg.[inaudible].