73% Faster With the Same Team

Steve Schroeder finds the delays nobody can see. He calls it the invisible factory, and the first time he put one on a wall, a telecom cut lead time on new features by 73%.

Steve Schroeder has spent almost twenty years finding the delays nobody can see.

He calls it the invisible factory. In a plant you can walk the line and watch the widgets pile up at the slow station. In a digital company the same pile ups exist, they are just invisible, sitting in approval queues and handoffs nobody has ever drawn on a wall. His first value stream mapping event ran inside a large telecom during a stalled Agile transformation. They mapped the billing department onto three walls of stickies and cut lead time on new features by 73%. The executive who walked the walls at the end had no idea any of it was happening inside his own company.

In this episode

• Why a company doing all the right frameworks can still be stuck, and what the framework cannot reach
• The invisible factory, and why digital work hides its own bottlenecks
• Three walls of stickies, a stunned executive, and a 73% cut in lead time
• What changes when AI joins value stream mapping, including rerunning twelve year old data and finding half a dozen more improvements
• Why a company full of individual AI agents can still be slow end to end
• The two roles that decide whether any of it survives: the value stream sponsor and the value stream manager
• What separates the companies that compound from the ones whose map goes in a drawer
• Utilization is the wrong scoreboard, and Messi walks most of the game

Timestamps

1. 00:00A show for founders who are done being the bottleneck
2. 01:07What a framework cannot fix in a stuck company
3. 02:28A three year Agile transformation that was not working
4. 04:59Three walls of stickies and a 73% cut in lead time
5. 07:12What AI adds to value stream mapping
6. 10:09Why a company full of agents can still be slow
7. 12:24Flow Killers and Flow Intelligence, who each book is for
8. 17:57The moment a client's business actually changes
9. 20:58What survives ninety days and what goes in a drawer
10. 24:08The sponsor and the value stream manager
11. 29:32Your developers are 99% utilized and it means nothing
12. 31:00Who he helps, and the industry he refuses to touch
13. 35:51Where to find Steve

About Steve

Steve Schroeder is the founder of EliteFlow Consulting and Solara Analytics. He pioneered digital value stream mapping, bringing a discipline built for factory floors into software organizations where the work is invisible. He wrote Flow Killers, which catalogs the fifty most common things that quietly slow a technology organization, and Flow Intelligence, on marrying value stream mapping to AI.

EliteFlow Consulting eliteflowconsulting.com

Solara Analytics solaraanalytics.ai