Despite the importance of product families, many lean efforts appear to spend little time evaluating their makeup, instead quickly leaping ahead to the more tangible tasks of mapping the processing steps within their value streams. Product families are often identified as the end items that are delivered to the customer. For instance, a product family for an automobile producer might be a family of cars, a mindset that misses the opportunity to draw on commonalities across their increments of value. This focus significantly limits their ability to leverage one of product families’ greatest benefits: a structure for promoting variation leveling dampening out internal disruption that is caused by shifts in the environment.
Figure 4-1 illustrates the mechanism for creating this variation