Do you even know your own process?

One of the participants in our builder program is a product manager on the supply chain team. She decided to automate how customs and duties codes are applied to shipments and purchase orders. It's tedious, high volume work where mistakes are expensive.

She has never applied a customs code herself. Someone else on her team does that. The codes depend on data that comes from an upstream system she'd never had to open, and the output goes to a broker process she'd only ever heard described.

This isn't a flaw in her project; it's the reality of how work gets done. Processes are a team sport. In a company our size, almost no one runs a process end-to-end. You know the step before yours as "the file shows up," and the step after yours as "I send it to them." People believe they understand the whole workflow, but they only really know their isolated part.

Because no one truly knows the whole process, the first step of building isn't building at all. You have to take a step back and do a user story map. You get the people who actually touch the work together and map it out: every step in order, who does what, what they wait on, and where it breaks. It’s a streamlined way to get everyone's input.

When the customs builder mapped her process, she found the actual bottleneck wasn't applying the codes at all. It was chasing down missing upstream product data. If she had skipped the mapping, she would have built something that doesn’t actually save time.

User story mapping is even worth doing if it’s your own process. If you’re the only one who knows how it works, you’re the bottleneck when you go on vacation. Mapping it out is how you stop being a single point of failure.