One bottleneck at a time - by James Stanier

Every engineering organization has a single constraint that caps its overall output at any moment. The piece argues that leaders who chase many initiatives end up with partial progress everywhere and no real results. By treating the team, department, or company as a system and identifying the bottleneck, you can concentrate resources where they matter most.

The author walks through Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, outlining the five focusing steps: identify the constraint, protect it from waste, subordinate everything else, elevate it if needed, and repeat. A concrete example shows a slow deployment pipeline that blocks releases; moving the best engineers onto that work shaves minutes from pipelines, turns deployments into a routine, and then reveals the next bottleneck.

The article also shows how this discipline applies at multiple levels. At the team level, a flaky test suite becomes the choke point; at the department level, a stalled hiring pipeline; at the company level, slow leadership sign-off. In each case, the solution is to redirect effort toward the waiting point, not to add more headcount or tools elsewhere. The result is faster flow of value and a clearer path for continuous improvement.

Finally, the piece challenges the cultural bias toward busyness, urging leaders to defend short-term optics in favor of long-term throughput. It ends with a call to action: identify your current biggest bottleneck and take a concrete step tomorrow to fix it, then repeat the cycle.