My guest for Episode #280 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Steve Pereira. He has spent over two decades improving the flow of work across organizations. He’s worked through tech support, IT management, platform and infrastructure engineering, product management, and as a founding CTO for enterprise SaaS.

Episode page with video, transcript, and more

He serves as CEO of Visible Consulting, as COO to the Value Stream Management Consortium, Chair of the OASIS VSM Interoperability technical committee, and co-founder of the Flow Collective to bring flow-focused professionals together. Since 2017, he has been developing and facilitating Flow Engineering.

He is the co-author of Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action - his co-author, Andrew Davis, was a guest here recently. Steve and Andrew also joined me for an episode of "Lean Blog Interviews."

In this episode, Steve shares his journey in improving workflows and the lessons learned from his favorite mistake. Steve recounts how, in a previous role as a developer, he assumed that his own needs mirrored those of other developers, leading him to spend significant time creating a solution without gathering proper feedback. This isolated approach resulted in wasted time and an ineffective outcome. Through this mistake, Steve realized the importance of customer validation and iterative development, key principles he now applies in his work.

We also explored the concept of "failure debt," the role of psychological safety in fostering learning from mistakes, and how flow engineering can transform collaborative workflows.

• What would you say is your favorite mistake?

• Steve's favorite mistake of assuming his own needs were the same as other developers, leading to wasted time.