Can Value Stream Management Solve DevOps‘ Struggles? | Steve Pereira

**Steve Pereira** (0:00)
You can piss off your customers by shipping constantly, right? I mean, you can throw them a bunch of garbage extremely efficiently and lose them, right? You can bury them in features. Like, delivery is not the goal. Value is always the goal.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
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**Conor Bronsdon** (0:57)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I am your cohost, Conor Bronsdon. And today we're joined by Steve Pereira. He is also known as the value stream guy. Steve, welcome to the show.

**Steve Pereira** (1:10)
Thanks for having me. Really looking forward to this conversation.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:14)
I have to ask is a value stream guy moniker, did someone call you that or did you think, oh, this is the name I want?

**Steve Pereira** (1:22)
Oh, it was both. It was like kept popping up. And then I was like, I'm obviously so focused on this thing. I just have better conversations when everybody knows that that's like the thing that I really wanna talk about.
So I just slapped it on and who knows, who knows if it's a good thing or not, but I do like the fact that people can see what I'm about really easily. I like it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:49)
It really speaks to what you wanna talk to. And to your point, it kind of drives home, hey, this is to coin a phrase, the value of what I'm gonna be speaking to. Because you've been a startup CTO, you've been an agency consultant, you've been a systems and release engineer, and through all of that, you've kind of been obsessed with this idea from what I can tell of making tech human. You help teams define and optimize their value streams today.
We've discussed value streams on the podcast, but it's been a long time, frankly. So I think this is perfect to have you on and revisit the subject to learn from the value stream guy. So for those in the audience who may not be aware, let's set a baseline.
What is value stream management?

**Steve Pereira** (2:30)
So, I mean, one way to think about value stream management is just like how business actually works, or even ignoring business, how work happens in a sustainable way. So essentially what I mean by sustainability is like being able to do something over and over again and continuously improve.
And the fundamental aspects of value streams that are important are the value part. So the fact that you are connecting to a customer who says, yes, I will pay you for this, or this is valuable to me, is essential because I think in tech, we've been divorced from that or distanced from that for a very, very long time.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:17)
And for the tech.

**Steve Pereira** (3:18)
Yeah, there's been so much time where tech was like off in the basement or in a corner, just working away because someone, they either assume that they're doing something important or valuable, or someone told them to do something.
And then they often come back to the business and they're like, hey, here's this thing. And the business is like, oh yeah, we asked for that like 18 months ago. That's not relevant anymore. Or like, we're on to the next thing. Or like, why is this taking so long? There's a million problems with this like disconnect between tech and business.
And so this value aspect is really important just to keep everybody focused on like, the reason that we're in business, the reason that we're doing anything is to create value and deliver value. But the other side of the coin that I find really appealing is the stream aspect, the flow aspect. The fact that when you deliver value, it has to be sustainable. That's like, you could think about that in an environmental context, but just from a repeatability perspective and operations perspective, like once you ship something, day one is over and day two is very, very long, right? Day two lasts forever. And you've got to come back to day one all the time, whenever you can, you got to come back to, how do we improve? How do we update this? How do we get ahead? How do we take this thing and leverage it into the next thing? And so this aspect of flow is so critical. And so I love value streams just as a way of framing discussion and focus and as a model for thinking that you can't just do anything once and what you do has to be valuable.