Most processes are full of waste, not because anyone is doing things wrong, but because inefficiency gets baked in over years until it becomes invisible. The five-minute wait. The manual data entry. The three people reviewing what one could approve. Nobody sees it anymore, because "that's just how we've always done it." Learn to see it, and every piece of waste becomes a feature somebody will pay you to eliminate.

What if your entire product roadmap was already sitting on a wall, written in red sticky notes?

In Episode 20 of Starting Up, host Jay Sensi runs the Analyze stage of DMAIC: taking the current-state map built last episode and systematically hunting everything broken, wasteful, and inefficient. The tool comes from manufacturing, the 8 forms of waste from Lean, and Jay explains why you have to train people to see problems they ...