Coincidence or not, several of my current and former colleagues asked me about this tool recently, so I thought: "Maybe it deserves an article to spare the repetitive explanation." As all the managers, I have a myriad of different tools and rituals to make it through the production pipeline. You probably know about different frameworks, artifacts, and rituals, but this tool here is always in the corner of the party.
The first I read about it was in the Lean Software Development book. I talk briefly about it in my lecture here. The tool (or process) is called Value Stream Mapping.
Value stream mapping is a bit like drawing a map of a journey, except this journey is all about how work gets done in a business. Imagine you're trying to figure out the best route from point A to point B, but instead of roads and landmarks, you're looking at how a product or service moves from the initial idea all the way to the customer. Or from one step of a pipeline to another if you are doing a VSM for a particular part of your production.
You start by sketching out every step in the process, kind of like plotting points on a map. You're not just looking at the big stops along the way but also the smaller, often overlooked steps. It's a bit like noticing all the little cafes and gas stations along a road trip, not just the major cities.
As you map out these steps, you also jot down how long each one takes and what it adds to the process. This helps you see where things are running efficiently and where time or resources might be getting wasted.
The process was originally introduced by Toyota, of course, and hence designed for manufacturing (just like the lean wastes). That's why most of the Google pictures for "value stream map" will look like this:
However, this does not stop us in game dev (and in software development in general) from applying it to our processes.
I strongly recommend doing it whenever you join a new team. VSM will show you the process for delivering the product, the steps, and who is accountable for what. This overview will then be helpful for many things: estimations, onboarding new team members, and planning the workload... What's really cool about value stream mapping is that it doesn't just show you the path as it is now; it also helps you imagine a better one. Once you've got the current state down on paper (whiteboard? Miro? Confluence page?), you start dreaming up a future state—a kind of ideal journey where everything runs more smoothly and fewer roadblocks are slowing things down. That's (at least for me) the core idea of value stream mapping: finding the most efficient and value-packed route for your work to travel from start to finish.
In a few first takes on it, I split the diagram into three sections: information flow, task flow, and timeline. The first one is to complete the overview, and the two others are tied together. Here is an example I prepared for the talk I linked above:
It's more of an abstract example, but you get the idea. I split my production pipeline into several areas, each of which had a defined starting point and a result the team needs to reach at the end to pass the ball to the next one (some things happen in parallel, but there is always a point in time that you can refer to). I started with predefined steps that, in my opinion, were relevant to that team, then I scheduled a meeting with that team, and we went through the flowchart together, adding the points I missed and correcting the wrong assumptions. This can also be drawn from scratch, but for me, coming up with something in advance is an excellent way to kickstart the conversation and save time (not just with VSM).
My understanding was that in the first section, the communication process is described so we all agree on how the information should flow from one "stakeholder" to another. I also listed all the members of each team and noted down how often they communicate and in which way, i.e., recurring meetings or message threads.
The following two parts represent milestones for the area of production that you are mapping. Each block is a milestone, with the time spent on that milestone and the downtime until the work on the next milestone can be started. For the milestones I identified the components and break down estimations for each of them, for the downtimes I tracked down the reasons. Then it's all a matter of coming up with suggestions for improvements. Sometimes all it takes is to talk about a problem so everyone is aligned, sometimes it requires a change of process, sometimes a new tool to implement.
Now, let's look at my modification of this. I'm not a fan of doing things strictly by the book, as I believe that any tool/ritual/framework should be applied and adjusted in a way that is the most efficient for your team. Don't take it too far though, as that can lead to a less efficient approach and lack of standardization. Common sense and balance are keys... good luck finding it.
In my current team, we have a self-made KPI to measure the manual work we do in order to minimize it through automation or improved processes. In this format, besides identifying the wastes, we are also asking ourselves if doing something in a different way can improve the speed and/or quality of what we do. We called it MEH Sessions.
Here is a template that I did together with my colleague for our art team. I removed all the sensitive info, of course, but you can spot the differences.
This format is easier to read, has a clear direction, and it also allows for additional steps outside of the usual flow. In manufacturing, the process is straightforward, like a one-way highway, while in creative teams, it's more like a set of roundabouts with some parts identical for all the participants and some leading to different destinations. This format also allowed me to chain more steps of the production more easily, so I ended up with a huge Miro board full of information that then needed to be processed, summarized, and turned into action points.
Again, this is my way of adopting the base of VSM to leave no "MEH" in our work. It does not mean that yours should be the same. In fact, my own way transforms over time so who knows what Murad from 2026 is plotting.
