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The Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) was created to help companies increase their organizational maturity in a structured and sustainable way. To make each level more tangible, the Kanban Pizza metaphor offers a playful and direct way to understand what happens — and what changes — at each stage of this journey.
This is an introduction to the maturity levels. To access the full model, visit kmm.plus/en.
ML0 — Inconsistent
The owners of the Inconsistent pizzeria see no value in management. For them, it is a waste of time. What counts here is everyone running around making pizzas.
Everyone competes to grab the order first, for counter space, for ingredients, and for the oven. The result depends entirely on the individual skills of one of the pizza makers — and customers know it. They do not trust the system; they trust their favorite pizza maker. So they only buy there if their preferred person is on shift.
At the Inconsistent pizzeria, the challenge is to deliver the pizza — quality is secondary. They celebrate every pizza that goes out, even if the customer rejects it and cancels payment.
ML1 — Team Focused
At the Team Focused pizzeria, the pizza makers have already understood that a process needs to be followed. The manager even developed a Kanban and called it “my lane, my life” — each employee has their own lane on the board.
The problem? Employees feel uncomfortable when they have no tasks. They are afraid of appearing idle. The result: everyone starts doing as many things as possible at the same time. The most important thing is to start doing.
Business results still depend on individual skills at each stage. No one lets go — and if someone is absent, the quality of the entire day is affected.
Pizzas come out with poor quality: size, delivery time, and ingredients are rarely right. Everything is delivered at the last minute, with great effort, leaving no time to develop new flavors or think about a new location.
The owners believe they need to reinforce the team culture. They hold motivational events, talks by famous pizza makers, and collective rituals. But with the overload, employees do not last long.
ML2 — Customer Focused
At the Customer Focused pizzeria, the pizza makers have started to understand that the important thing is to provide good service from end to end — from receiving the order to delivery at the customer’s door.
Here there is a Service Request Manager (SRM), responsible for ensuring orders are clear and priorities well managed. They know, for example, that customers in area 2 work late and need more urgent deliveries than those in area 1, which is residential.
The pizza-making process is consistent, and there are agreements among pizza makers to cover absences without impacting deliveries. In the execution flow, the Service Delivery Manager (SDM) acts quickly on bottlenecks — managing oven queues, or preemptively arranging a generator in anticipation of a power outage on a busy Saturday.
Since nothing is perfect: quality still depends on who is on shift, and there are difficulties balancing capacity and demand. The dough sometimes comes out burned, the pizza arrives late and cold — but only sometimes.
ML3 — Fit for Purpose
All customers like the Fit for Purpose pizzeria. In addition to quality and consistency, they have a greater variety of pizzas than competitors — and are always creating new flavors. This builds customer loyalty.
Fit for Purpose has a genuine concern with listening to customers and maintains satisfaction metrics. There is plenty of space for reflection: “are we doing what really matters?”
They created a customer classification by level of demand — and developed differentiated pricing policies. In the express tier, the customer receives the pizza in up to 15 minutes, paying a little more for it.
Work balancing is done with excellence. They have the discipline to temporarily turn off the order system when demand exceeds capacity — avoiding late deliveries, low quality, and emotional burnout among pizza makers.
With this balance, there is energy left for new ideas: studying the service area, planning new locations, developing new flavors. There is a constantly evolving idea board. It is a company that continuously reinvents itself.
ML4 — Risk Protected
At the Protected pizzeria, everyone is happy. They have been through the loyalty-building phases and have a brand recognized throughout the region for excellence.
Initiatives like “one free day per week” emerge naturally, as work has reached high levels of optimization — satisfying customers and employees alike.
The owners constantly assess market risks and systemic impacts across their large network of pizzerias. Proactive action plans are taken — such as reducing dependence on a single delivery company by diversifying logistics partnerships.
Protected has highly efficient shared service centers: pre-cooked doughs, premium ingredients prepared in advance. There is a deep understanding of why the customer chooses them — and this strengthens the brand with every cycle.
Want to Go Deeper?
The KMM is a structured model with seven organizational maturity levels, developed by David J. Anderson. This pizzeria metaphor is just an introduction — a way to make concrete what, in practice, requires analysis, diagnosis, and consistent evolution. At more advanced levels, the management of fixed dates changes completely in nature — as detailed in Fixed Delivery Dates: Heroes or Villains?. And if you want to see flow and integration principles applied in a real high-volume context, the article What Kanban at McDonald’s Can Teach Us brings a complementary perspective.
To access the full model, visit kmm.plus/en.