3.1 Value mapping

Properly understanding feature value, risks and rewards informs prioritization. It gives you the means to take control of your work and deliver fast with crystal clear, unambiguous decisions.

Photo by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash

For a deeper dive into Value Stream Engineering, or “VSE,” take a look at the companion two-part article, How to deliver more customer value than your competitors. There’s also a quick explainer video coming soon. VSE is a core practice woven throughout the Delivery Playbook, and fundamental to delivering what matters most to your customer.

Introduction

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of injecting your customer’s needs into the development lifecycle. A vital step in this process is weighing customer benefits versus business drivers, costs and risks of each feature. I see too many teams gloss this over and jump to conclusions. They build things that could have been reused from elsewhere or mistakenly assume how much a customer cares about some given feature.

Value mapping, much like value stream mapping or “VSM,” falls under the larger umbrella of value stream engineering. It’s an exercise that visually depicts key components and processes, effectively describing their relative value, priority and disposition. Done correctly, it fosters collaboration and decision-making about how best to proceed with implementation.

It gives you and your team the means to take control of your work. You have clarity on whether to build or leverage. You know what your customer values most and what your business needs most. You can communicate to the business, to your team, to your boss, in crystal clear, unambiguous terms about why these decisions are the right ones rather than fighting to go in the right direction.

It aligns effort around the most important thing that you need to deliver. It eliminates ambiguity, and crystalizes focus on getting value into production most efficiently, with consistent, high velocity.

Every self-organizing team needs a clear value mapping practice. It’s how you choose the best path forward.

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In case you’re wondering, you’re already doing value stream mapping (VSM). It’s built into the Delivery Playbook and its design approach. It starts with aligning design activities around objectives and key results and the exploration of business activities using event storming. The specific flavor we use is “value stream engineering,” or “VSE,” and the goal is to let you see everything about your work: each feature’s importance, how data flows through the system, what it produces, and its impact on your customer. Value mapping is just one focused step in the process that will make sure we deliver features in the most effective manner.