One of the biggest problems in product development is delivering valuable features so late that they no longer provide a competitive advantage. As the Maersk case study shows, a major contributor to this problem is batching up features into projects and delivering the results to customers after months of waiting. Value stream mapping often reveals — as it did at Maersk — that much of the time spent waiting was in the analysis phase, with features sitting in the product backlog waiting to be analyzed, estimated, approved, and prioritized for development.
