From Pizza Hut to Flow Engineering
How Kitchen Chaos Sparked a Passion for Workflow Optimization
When people ask how I got into this line of work, they expect a story rooted in technology or business school. Each of those is part of the story, but they’re more like the trunk of the tree than the roots. Instead, I tell them it likely started when I was a teenager, working my first job at Pizza Hut. Aside from a paper route and other odd jobs, it was my first exposure to the world of work, process, and collaboration. The lessons I learned in a bustling kitchen would forge my sense of flow. Juggling distractions, blockers, WIP, SLIs, SLAs, conflicting priorities, politics and more, I developed an allergy to friction, waste, and delay - without even realizing it.
The Kitchen: A Crash Course in Chaos
Working at Pizza Hut wasn’t glamorous. On a Friday night, the kitchen transformed into a tornado of activity. Orders came in faster than we could read them, with huge spikes and momentary lulls sprinkled in between. Dough needed stretching, toppings were flying, ovens were full, and the phone never stopped ringing. Everyone had a role, but in the heat of the moment, those roles would blur. The separation between success and disaster was too close for comfort.
Looking back I realize that the kitchen wasn’t just chaotic—it was a living system. A complex, adaptive system. When one part broke down, the whole operation suffered. If the prep station ran out of cheese, the pizzas slowed down. If the ovens weren’t loaded efficiently, orders backed up. If the delivery drivers didn’t have clear instructions, customers waited too long. Every inefficiency was magnified under pressure, and they often cascaded.
Discovering the Power of Process
At first, it was overwhelming. But gradually, I started to see patterns. The best shifts weren’t the ones with the most skilled cooks—they were the ones where everyone flowed together. We developed our own shortcuts, signals, and routines. We learned to anticipate problems before they happened. We rearranged our stations to save precious seconds and wasted effort. We communicated constantly, adapting on the fly.
I didn’t know it at the time, but we were practicing the fundamentals of workflow optimization. We lived in the gemba, but regularly stepped back to see the whole value stream—tracing and retracing how an order moved from the phone call to the final handoff, and where we could shave off waste. I remember practicing until I could cut a pizza in 1.7 seconds (we would have races), finally besting the district manager, after months of learning on misorders and discards that your speed only matters if you cut correctly. There was a real culture of iterating, improving, and learning from every mistake.
From Pizza Hut to Flow Engineering
Don’t get me wrong, I was an ignorant teenager fumbling through a job I prayed to finish as soon as possible, but there were moments when you could sink into the work and run with it. Moments of flow. I can still feel it. Years later, as I moved into the world of software development I chased that feeling. In the absence of the structure of the kitchen, the established processes, and the clear value proposition, it’s very difficult to find that flow. I often felt it only to discover that I was running in the wrong direction. I was missing the value and clarity that make effective flow possible. The chaos of a busy restaurant is not so different from the complexity of a modern product development practice. Both are systems under pressure, both rely on clarity and value, and both succeed or fail based on their ability to adapt and improve.
The same mechanisms that enabled the kitchen: clear acceptance criteria, established process, platforms and standards, enabling constraints, and measurement-are clearly defined in all the highest performing organizations, and notably absent in struggling organizations.
These gaps in value, clarity, and flow are exactly what Flow Engineering is aimed at closing—a structured approach to making work visible, mapping processes, and enabling continuous improvement. Flow Engineering is about more than diagrams and metrics; it’s about understanding how people, tools, and information move together to deliver value. It’s about focusing on the most impactful issues, eliminating waste, and creating the conditions for teams to do their best work—even when things get hectic. They don’t get less hectic the longer you put them off.
Why It Matters
A busy restaurant will show you that disruption and disorder in complex adaptive systems is inevitable, but friction, confusion, and waste are optional. With the right mindset and tools, even the busiest environment can become a place of flow, learning, and growth. Whether you’re making pizzas or building software, the principles of flow, and the first steps are the same: focus on value, define your workflow, leverage systems, and never stop looking for ways to improve.
Flow Engineering gives teams a way to step back, see the big picture, and work together to streamline their processes. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s progress. And sometimes, the best time to learn is when the pressure is high.
As always: Start where you are, show progress, go further!
20% off the Flow Engineering Course!
🚨 Limited-Time Offer Extended! 🚨 The Flow Engineering Course is still 20% off—but not for long! Originally ending June 15th, this exclusive discount has been extended for a short time only. Don’t miss your chance to learn how to enhance collaboration and performance in large-scale organizations using a proven, systematic approach. Master five powerful mapping techniques to visualize workflows, identify constraints, and drive continuous improvement across teams.
Through hands-on exercises and real-world examples, you'll learn how to:
- Align teams around clear, valuable outcomes
- Map and measure value streams to identify bottlenecks
- Analyze dependencies that impact performance
- Design improved future states
- Create actionable roadmaps for change
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Have you already taken the course? I’d love to hear how you applied the learning