What Breakfast at a Diner Taught Us About Flow, Kanban, and Service Level Expectations
Once a year, my lovely wife, Costanza, and I enjoy switching off for some weeks, crossing the pond and hiking the US National Parks. Costanza works as a production engineer, driving productivity improvements on the shop floor - she leans heavily on lean practices (pun intended). I lead an R&D team building software products, with a strong focus on Kanban and sustainable delivery. As I am a far better photographer* than writer (proof here :), with some help from ChatGPT, I wanted to share an interesting conversation we had on a very early morning.
Pancakes
This morning, Costanza and I found ourselves deep in a discussion about flow. Not at work, not in a meeting room — but while waiting for pancakes and omelettes at the Jackson Lake Lodge diner.
We had woken up at 4:00 AM to photograph Mormon Row at sunrise (yes, totally worth it), and by 7:00 AM, we were back indoors, shivering slightly, sipping coffee, and waiting for breakfast. The moment felt still—until our shared obsession with continuous improvement kicked in.
So naturally, we started mapping out the diner’s operations through the lens of flow.
The diner offered both takeaway and sit-in service, and that sparked a string of questions:
• Should takeaway orders be prioritized over dine-in ones?
• Should there be two separate flows (and teams) for these order types?
• Or should the focus be on minimizing order cycle time, without distinguishing between order classes?
Translating Breakfast into Kanban Terms
As we sipped our coffee, we couldn’t help but think in Kanban terms: expedite lanes, classes of service, cycle time, throughput.
From a pure flow perspective, reducing cycle time sounds like the universal goal. But, of course, any business has constraints: staffing, cost, space, and the ever-present need to be profitable. You can’t just throw more people at the problem.
That’s when the key question hit us — the one that underpins any flow discussion, whether in manufacturing or software:
What are the service level expectations required by the business?
The Role of Perceived Wait Time
From a business standpoint, you don’t necessarily need to serve orders as fast as technically possible. You need to serve them fast enough that the customer experience remains positive.
But “fast enough” is a slippery concept — it depends heavily on context and customer expectations. When I’m seated, coffee in hand, and engaged in a good conversation, my tolerance for waiting is quite high. I’m not watching the clock. But if I were a takeaway customer, standing near the counter, glancing at my phone, every minute would feel like five.
So here’s the insight we landed on before the omelette arrived:
Customer expectations aren’t uniform. And your flow should be designed around meeting different service level expectations, not blindly optimizing speed across the board.
For example:
• Takeaway customers might expect their order in under 5 minutes — with a goal to hit that for 75% of cases.
• Sit-in customers might be perfectly happy if their food arrives within 15 minutes — let’s say 85% of the time.
This nuanced thinking helps shift the conversation from “how fast can we deliver?” to “how do we deliver fast enough, sustainably, and where it matters?”
Wrapping Up (Before the Pancakes Get Cold)
This wasn’t a business meeting. Just two friends — one from engineering, the other from software — talking flow over breakfast. But the lesson is real:
Whether you’re running a diner, a factory, or a product development team, flow optimization doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It should always be grounded in customer experience and service level expectations.
Now, if you’ll excuse us, our omelettes just arrived — and even continuous improvement takes a pause for pancakes.
*If you are interested in Lorenzo’s pictures, you can check some of them out at https://thedistantview.myportfolio.com/albums