Performing an early assessment to identify opportunities for aligning product families in a way that optimizes the grouping of common elements is critical. It should be conducted before major changes are made, like outsourcing major elements of work, in order to keep from locking out the ability to make important shifts. Doing so will increase understanding product families as a means for promoting value stream thinking, defining them as the driving mechanisms for routing out lag. Moreover, identifying product families that promote this result farther back in the continuum of value creation stands to amplify the benefits, expanding efforts past narrow threads of savings toward creating broad webs of improvement whose benefits extend across the entire value-added map, driving down uncertainty across a wide range of activities.