Ten Lifecycle Stages of a Value Stream
Author: Jurgen Appelo
I have too many ideas.
Most of them remain just ideas. (Thank God!) They don't even get past the first stage of initiation. Some ideas I explore a bit, but then they perish in the experimentation or validation stages. A few of my ideas have made it past the experiments; they crystallized and even expanded and generated good business for me. Some of the successful ones have already retired or died.
Ten lifecycle stages of value streams
In my book Startup, Scaleup, Screwup, I talk about how the ten business lifecycle stages apply to products and business models. After writing that book, people have shown me that the ten lifecycle stages are fractal: they can apply to entire businesses and individual feature sets. For this reason, I changed my language to refer to the lifecycle stages of value streams because value streams are scale-invariant: they have no specific size. You can see an entire Tesla factory as one large value stream, but you can also see a simple support desk as a value stream. Both the factory and the support desk start as someone's idea, and at some point in time, they cease to exist.
Four stages of Steve Blank's Customer Development model
I find it helpful to think about the lifecycle stages of value streams. In the early stages, we do many experiments to figure out how to do the right thing. In later stages, we steadily switch to execution to do the thing right. And there's a gradual transformation from experimentation to execution.
You don't have to agree with the model in all its details. The stages are sometimes named differently; they can often overlap; the transitions are vague and blurry, and at a small scale, we can simplify them to maybe three or four stages (as in Steve Blank’s model). That's OK. It's not a perfect model, but it's a helpful model. It helps to remind us that the practices of developing, growing, and exploiting a value stream evolve over time.
Initiation
Someone has an idea for a new value stream.Expedition
First experimentation with an idea, seeking problem/solution fit.Formation
Full commitment of a team to create the new value stream.Validation
Further experimentation with the idea, seeking product/market fit.Stabilization
Seeking business/market fit, preparing to scale up the value stream.Acceleration
Scaling up the value stream to serve a large market.Crystallization
The value stream is well established; switching to optimization.Expansion
Expansion to other variants and spin-offs of the value stream.Conservation
All goals achieved; the value stream is in decline.Termination
Closure of the value stream, focus on other opportunities.
What stage is your value stream in?
