Lean didn’t invent value streams. The steps you take to turn customer requests into receipts would exist even if Lean didn’t. Lean thinkers merely named those steps value streams and provided tools to organize your thinking around those steps and other things.
Merely.
Those tools revolutionized manufacturing, and they’ll help you shift your focus onto what it takes to deliver value to your customers. And knowing how you do that will give you a competitive advantage.
Why? Because from what I’ve seen, most organizations with a software development component haven’t analyzed how software development contributes to delivering value to customers.
“But Ethan, our product offering is software.”
I promise you I’m not straining at gnats here to sound cool and mysterious on LinkedIn. Your product offering is decidedly not software.
There isn’t some software mine you send your developers to so that they can retrieve some software and ship it to your customers.
In fact, your customers don’t want or care about software They care about their problems, and they want things that make their problems go away. They’re trying to do things, and they want tools that help them do those things.
Your product offering is solutions to your customers’ problems. If you work at a so-called “software” company, that is merely a component in delivering your solution. And possibly the one your customers care about the least.
