Glossary

Business value: generally any initiative or goal that fulfills a near-term or long-term need of the business

Bet: A relatively small, hypothesis-driven initiative that may serve to create value toward a larger organizational goal .

Compliance: ensuring your organization adheres to the law as well as industry regulations, legally binding contracts etc.

Continuous Deployment: an automated testing and deployment process that releases code changes directly to a production environment for customers to consume.

Cost of delay: quantifies the impact of time on outcomes, typically expressed as potential revenue lost when a delayed product or service cannot be consumed by customers.

Customer: for the purpose of this eBook, “customer” can mean either an internal facing stakeholder, or an external customer to which you provide products or services. In most cases, we are referring to the latter, and will note when the case is otherwise.

Customer experience: the series of touchpoints that occur between a business and a customer.

Customer time-to-value: the duration between when a customer purchases and when they can actually realize the value of the product.

Customer value: one way to think of customer value is that when your product or service leads to a customer feeling more empowered, less stressed or more capable, then you’ve created customer value.

Delay time: the amount of time spent between two processes.

DevOps: a diverse set of principles and practices intended to improve overall software development flow and quality.

Governance: a form of steering that articulates responsibilities, accountabilities, and authority and empowerment.

Incremental: generally a new edition or version of something already in process.

Lean value tree: a visual representation of an organizations vision, goals, objectives etc rendered in a tree format.

Legacy systems: long-standing software/hardware systems that may not be compatible with newer software/hardware systems

MVP: minimum viable product - the smallest increment of a new product that can be deployed to test assumptions about problem/solution fit

Net present value: the difference between what a product or service is currently worth and what it is costing to sustain the product or service.

Principle of optionality: mitigates uncertainty by testing a range of possible solutions without committing to any particular solution

Process time: the duration of time that elapses between when a task enters a process and leave the process

Product/market fit: the point at which a product not only solves a problem, but can also scale in terms of sales and adoption.

Product/solution fit: the point at which a nascent product has proven to solve a real customer problem.

Thin-slice: an initiative that is narrow in scope, but requires deep organizational integration, commitment and participation to succeed.

Value stream: An extended value stream includes those activities that precede a customer order (e.g., responding to a request for a quote, determining market needs, developing new products, etc.) or occur following the delivery of a good or service to a customer (e.g., billing and processing payments or submitting required compliance reports).