Is Your Startup Wasteful?

Is your startup wasteful? 

Use Lean thinking and AI to reduce waste and increase the speed and amount of customer value you’re delivering. 

Here are some tips to reduce waste in your organization by getting Lean.

First, map and scrutinize your processes through the Lean lens:

• Overproduction: Are you creating more features than your customers use?

• Waiting: Is there downtime in your workflows waiting for decisions or inputs?

• Unnecessary Transport: Are there too many handoffs between teams causing delays?

• Over-processing: Are you over-engineering solutions to simple problems?

• Excess Inventory: Are you stockpiling resources or work that isn’t immediately needed?

• Unnecessary Motion: Are your teams wasting effort on non-value-adding activities?

• Defects: How much time is spent correcting errors that could have been prevented?

See where you’re creating waste and find ways to make the process more efficient or change the process to remove wasted steps altogether. 

Now that you’ve got your process map and identified some areas of improvement, think about how AI can help you reduce waste and increase customer value.

As you map out your processes, look at each step, and consider:

• Human-only: Only humans should perform this step. 

• Hybrid: Humans working with AI should perform this step.

• Automated: AI should perform this step without any human intervention

Then, set goals around your process, like reducing timing or increasing output, and begin experimenting with improving steps. 

If you’re meeting your goals, then fully implement the change. If not, try another experiment!