Value streams have been a central tenet of Lean thinking for decades, starting with Toyota and the Lean Manufacturing movement, and are now widely adopted across industries. Despite this, many businesses still need to harness the full potential of value streams to drive organizational change and achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness. Instead, they may focus narrowly on metrics like team velocity or production pipeline speed, missing the broader picture of the end-to-end system.
In modern product development, understanding value streams is crucial to optimizing our ways of working and delivering value to customers. By mapping the path to value, we can gain visibility into our processes and identify improvement areas, such as code deployment bottlenecks or mismatches between personnel and roles.