One bottleneck at a time - The Engineering Manager

Every system, whether a factory or a software team, has exactly one constraint that caps its overall output at any moment. Trying to improve any other part of the system creates inventory that piles up at that constraint and does nothing for real progress. The article forces leaders to abandon the scattered approach of juggling many initiatives and instead adopt a sequential focus on the single biggest bottleneck.

The insight comes from Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints and its five focusing steps: identify the constraint, ensure it isn't wasted, subordinate everything else to it, elevate it if needed, and repeat. The classic factory analogy-where speeding up a fast station does not increase output because a slower station is the bottleneck-maps directly onto software workflows: pull-request backlogs, stalled QA, and delayed leadership sign-offs are all symptoms of the current constraint.

A concrete example is a painfully slow deployment pipeline that limits releases to once every two weeks. By moving the best engineers from glamorous feature work to automate checks, improve test coverage, and streamline the pipeline, the team can ship multiple times a day. Once that bottleneck disappears, the next constraint surfaces elsewhere, prompting a new cycle of focused improvement.

The article also stresses the courage required to subordinate fast-moving parts of the organization to the bottleneck. Leaders must convince stakeholders that short-term optics of reduced feature velocity are worth the long-term gain in flow. By consistently applying this discipline, technical managers turn busy-work into measurable throughput gains across teams and the whole organization.