PT
EN
Every time I walk into a McDonald’s, I am impressed by the upstream.
There are no WIP limits for ordering meals. In some locations you find three or four cashiers at registers, plus two or three self-service kiosks for online orders. And yet the queues move, orders go out, customers leave satisfied.
This raises questions every Kanban practitioner should ask:
- How do they deliver so many orders with such a low lead time?
- What is the key to such a high throughput?
- How do they handle bottlenecks?
McDonald’s is all about fast food — and, sometimes, smiling at customers. But does what they do relate to our knowledge work environment, where the customer is often very far away?
Let us explore what we can learn — and what we should adapt.
1. Integration Is Everything
McDonald’s operates as an autonomous mini-factory. Different cells work in combination to produce the final item, and there is a close connection between the assembly area and customer service.
They do not need metrics to know an order is delayed. They simply look at the counter full of trays with drinks and fries. When a bottleneck occurs, communication between the order manager and the assembly team is direct and immediate.
In knowledge work, we need to strengthen the connections between the departments that deliver our services and break down silos.
Today we place a great deal of emphasis on scaling methods, always looking upward. It would be more productive to look sideways — integrating the people who deliver the service end to end.
And metrics? They are important for continuous improvement. But a queue is a queue. You do not need beautiful, colorful charts to know that column on your Kanban board is overloaded. How about paying closer attention to CFDs and run charts? Organizations that mature in this reading start treating deadlines differently — as explained in Fixed Delivery Dates: Heroes or Villains?.
2. Invest in Standardization
In finance, there is a famous study that measured the cost of living across countries. To have a comparable baseline, researchers needed a standardized product. They chose the Big Mac. A Big Mac is a Big Mac anywhere in the world.
And is that good for us? Yes and no.
This is where the things McDonald’s cannot teach us begin to appear.
Knowledge work needs to preserve its artisanal side. It was not standardization that led Pokémon Go to earn 200 million dollars in a month — it was the opposite: the space to create something outside the norm.
But we do not need to go to extremes. What I observe in companies where I work as a consultant is the absence of basic standards. It is possible to visit three or four squads working on products in the same technology — and find completely different process stages, work item types without a common naming convention, with no shared definition of done.
We need minimal standardization, with deliberate space to break it.
3. Invest in Ingredient Preparation
At McDonald’s, everything is ready to go into action when an order is placed. The tomatoes are sliced, the lettuce cut, the mayonnaise in position. Assembly is fast because preparation happened beforehand.
In the early Scrum adoptions in Brazil, there was great attention to this preparation. There were boards and cadences dedicated to validating which ingredients were ready to start the sprint: screens, specifications, managerial approvals, supporting systems.
Scaling happened by looking sideways, not upward. With the scaling framework craze, it seems we lost that. Focus shifted to roadmaps, portfolio visions, programs, and tribes — and the care for item readiness took a back seat.
Ingredient preparation still matters. A lot.
4. Avoid Overproduction — but Not Always
To increase efficiency, would it make sense to produce 500 Big Macs in the morning and keep them warm until sold?
In practice, the opposite. You walk in and there are two or three burgers kept warm. Most of the time, they are assembled while your drink and fries are being prepared. Overproducing would create storage costs, waste, and the risk of unsold product.
In knowledge work, the logic is different — and more complex.
In discovery stages, where new ideas are validated, overproduction is necessary. But we should make maximum use of prototyping tools to validate these ideas cheaply and quickly.
It is the same dilemma faced by large game companies: they did not succeed by limiting the number of ideas — it was the opposite.
I like to use the oil platform metaphor to explain this effect. The knowledge world is an exploration platform. You need to drill in a region of the ocean to find oil — a search that can be costly. But one well in the right place is enough to pay for all the costs and generate extraordinary returns. No oil company went bankrupt from exploring.
5. Flexible and Multidisciplinary Workforce
McDonald’s employees are trained to work flexibly across multiple stations. They are trained to extract the most from production spaces with real constraints: speed, consistency, quality, space, and movement.
Everyone is multidisciplinary — and each person knows exactly their role within the system, while covering colleagues when necessary.
In knowledge work, multidisciplinarity reduces bottlenecks, increases throughput, and makes teams less vulnerable to occasional absences.
6. Orientation by Goals, Objectives, and Improvement Suggestions
McDonald’s encourages its employees to be guided by the company’s objectives. They reward those who achieve goals. But above all, they value those who develop initiatives to improve current practices and procedures.
They simultaneously look at strategic objectives and floor-level problems — and learn, in the company’s way, to make these two ends converge.
What to Take to Your Context
McDonald’s is not a model to be copied — it is a useful mirror. It shows us, with brutal clarity, what happens when integration, preparation, standardization, and flexibility work together. The organization’s maturity level determines how close it can get to this ideal — and the Kanban Maturity Model explains that journey with another everyday metaphor: the pizzeria.
In knowledge work, the challenge is greater: our products are invisible, our customers are sometimes many silos away, and creativity cannot be standardized like a burger recipe.
But the principles of flow, integration, and continuous improvement? Those apply in any kitchen.