Most organizations still treat the value stream as a team-level mapping exercise — but the real picture is much bigger. Helen Beal, Chief Flow of Flowtopia, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to preview Flowtopia Live 2026 — the 12-hour virtual conference on June 24 with 50 live talks across product, engineering, and leadership — and to unpack what a value stream network actually is. Helen explains how value streams interconnect across teams, products, and even outside the organization into customers, suppliers, and partners, and why leaders need that full network view to make smart calls on risk, governance, and investment. She and Alan also dig into the pairing of flow engineering (how fast and clean the value stream runs) with outcome engineering (whether what comes out is actually valuable), why token-maxing AI is the latest version of an old flow problem, and why 25 years of the same security vulnerabilities point to the same broken end-to-end processes.