This month, we’re going to think about our teams, departments, and organisations as systems. Specifically, we’re going to consider how we can increase throughput and output by identifying and removing the biggest bottleneck at any given time.

This might sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare in practice. Most leaders spread their effort across many initiatives simultaneously, making partial progress on everything and completing nothing. The insight we’ll explore is that systems don’t work that way: there’s always one constraint that matters most, and focusing elsewhere is, at best, wasted effort.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• We’ll start by looking at a pattern I call the scattered leader, which is the well-intentioned but ineffective approach of fighting on multiple fronts at once.
• Then we’ll dig into the core insight from Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal and the Theory of Constraints: every system has a single primary bottleneck, and improving anything else doesn’t improve the system.
• We’ll look at a practical example of what happens when you put your best people on unglamorous but critical work.
• And we’ll talk about the courage required to subordinate everything else to fixing the bottleneck.

If you find this topic interesting, here are some complementary articles from the archive:

• The beauty of constraints reframes constraints as tools rather than obstacles.
• The contribution curve explains why hiring doesn’t instantly help, since new people are net-negative contributors initially.
• Delegation covers how spreading knowledge reduces single points of failure.

But for now, let’s focus on bottlenecks. Let’s get going.

The scattered leader

Imagine a leader who’s looking at their organisation and seeing a lot of problems. Deployments are slow and painful, so the team avoids them. The hiring pipeline has stalled, with candidates stuck waiting for interviews. Code reviews are backing up, with PRs sitting for days before anyone looks at them. And there’s that auth system refactor that’s been on the roadmap for six months.

So they do what feels like the responsible thing: they start working on all of it. Some time spent researching CI improvements, a meeting with talent about hiring, a push to get reviews moving, leading a technical spike on the auth system. Progress is being made on everything, but nothing is getting finished.

Sound familiar?

This approach feels diligent, and it certainly looks proactive to those around you, because people and organisations tend to feel that being at capacity is the metric for success. But in an era of flattened organisations where managers are under high scrutiny, we need to focus deeply on our impact rather than our busyness.

The Great Flattening has seen companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta cut management layers en masse, with middle managers making up 29% of all layoffs in 2024. In this environment, even though partial progress means saturation of your time, optimising for busyness rather than impact is going to lead to failure.

So what’s the alternative? It’s actually quite radical, because it requires you to do one thing at a time in a world that rewards the appearance of doing many things at once. It starts with thinking about your team, department, or organisation as a system with inputs and outputs, and systems have a particular property: at any given time, there is only one bottleneck that is limiting the throughput of the whole thing.

You can work on improving other parts of the system concurrently, but it won’t make any difference to the overall output. In fact, it often makes things worse by creating pile-ups of work waiting at the bottleneck. The discipline here is sequential focus: find the single biggest constraint, put all of your effort into removing it, then find the next one. It sounds simple, but it goes against every instinct we have as leaders to be seen as busy and responsive to all problems.

Finding the bottleneck

Like all good ideas, this idea isn’t new, and we can learn a lot from studying history. As mentioned in the introduction, it comes from Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, a business novel from 1984 that introduced the Theory of Constraints.

The core insight is simple: every system, whether it’s a factory or a software team, has exactly one constraint that limits its overall throughput at any given time. Improving anything other than that constraint doesn’t improve the system. It just creates inventory, and inventory is bad because it creates blockages.

Goldratt outlines five focusing steps:

1. Identify the constraint.
2. Make sure it’s not being wasted on unnecessary work.
3. Subordinate everything else to it.
4. Elevate it if needed (invest to increase its capacity).
5. Repeat.

The key insight is that this is a cycle, not a one-time fix.

Goldratt illustrates this with a factory analogy. Imagine three stations on a production line: Station A builds components at 100 units per hour, Station B assembles them at 10 units per hour, and Station C packages them at 100 units per hour. If you invest in making Station A faster, pushing it to 150 units per hour, you don’t get more output. You get a pile of components waiting at Station B. You can already see what needs to be done to improve this system.

In software teams, this pattern shows up everywhere: pull requests pile up waiting for review, features sit in staging for weeks waiting for QA, decisions stall because they’re waiting for leadership sign-off, and engineers are blocked because specs aren’t ready. Where you find things waiting is where you also find the bottleneck, and the question you need to ask yourself and your team is simple: what are we waiting on right now?

The deployment bottleneck

Let’s work through an example. Imagine that in your organisation, deployments are slow, painful, and risky. Because of past incidents, you’ve increased the number of manual checks and gates for every deploy, and now you’re only deploying once every two weeks. Engineers see it as a platform problem, while the platform team sees it as an engineering problem, since they need to up their quality and stop breaking things. Therefore, it sits unfixed: it’s not glamorous work, it’s not anyone’s specific responsibility, and the company is afraid of change in case things break even more.

Now imagine that you have oriented your department towards fixing bottlenecks as the most important priority, and you now recognise deployment as THE constraint. Everything else in the system is waiting on it, so you make a decision: you take some of your best engineers, the ones who would normally be working on the most exciting product features, and you put them on fixing the deployment pipeline.

This feels counterintuitive, and you’ll face resistance, because we naturally want to point our highest performers at the sexiest problems, not the ugliest ones. But constraints are often the ugliest problems, and changing this cultural instinct is part of the work of leadership, because high performers turn ugly work into beautiful work.

What happens next?

Assuming that you are offering the right empowerment and environment, your high performers bring their standards to the work. They automate the manual checks. They improve test coverage so that failures are caught earlier. They measure the length of time that it takes for pipelines to run and shave off minutes by parallelising automated tests. They make it so that anyone can deploy by just pressing a button.

Within weeks, the team is deploying multiple times a day instead of once a fortnight. Deploys become fast, reliable, and fundamentally boring. Now an interesting phenomenon occurs: the bottleneck moves elsewhere, perhaps to product specs or code review, and that’s the signal that it worked.

Now you find the next constraint and do it again.

The courage to subordinate

We mentioned subordination earlier in the five focusing steps. It means that once you’ve identified the constraint, everything else in the system must be reallocated to it. This is the justification for what we described above: taking your best engineers off feature work and pointing them at the bottleneck. Subordination gives you the framework to create that environment and defend that decision.

In practice, it means telling the fast parts of the system to slow down, or redirecting their effort towards helping the bottleneck. If your developers are producing more code than your reviewers can handle, the answer isn’t to hire more engineers immediately. It’s to have some developers stop writing new code and start helping with reviews, or building tooling that makes reviews faster.

This takes courage because it looks wrong to some company leadership. You’ll face questions: “Why isn’t our best engineer shipping features?” “Why is the team’s velocity down this sprint?” “The team looks less productive on paper.” I’ve had exactly these conversations, and the discomfort is real. You’ll need to defend the decision upward, explaining that short-term optics matter less than long-term throughput. I’ve written before about the tragedy of the common leader and the importance of long-termism in leadership. This is one of those cases.

The alternative, which is busy hands creating more inventory that piles up at the bottleneck, feels productive but achieves nothing. We’re not trying to make everyone busy. We’re trying to optimise the flow of value through the system.

Your turn

Now it’s your turn. I’d encourage you to spend five minutes thinking about your team, your department, and your company. At each level, write down what you think the biggest bottleneck is to going faster right now. Then write down what you could do actionably to fix it.

At the team level, perhaps your test suite is slow and flaky, and all of the onus is being put on the QA engineer to fix it while the other engineers don’t think it’s their problem. The action here is to have all of the engineers pivot their time to speeding up the test suite together, rather than leaving it to one person.

At the department level, perhaps your hiring pipeline has stalled, with roles open for months and not enough candidates coming through. The action here is to get everyone to step outside of their usual role. For example, all engineers could spend a morning together every week sourcing people online, both from their networks and through reachouts on LinkedIn.

At the company level, perhaps leadership sign-off on major decisions is slow, sometimes taking weeks for people to get back. The action here is to focus all effort on speeding up decisions by building a process to make sure that the most important things are shown to leadership every single day, and putting in place a 24-hour turnaround time for them to say yes, no, or to request more information.

So, what’s your bottleneck at each level? And what could you do about it? Could you start making progress on it tomorrow?

Wrapping up

The scattered leader fights every battle and wins none. The focused leader finds the single constraint and removes it, then does it again. It’s a simple discipline, but a hard one to maintain in a world that rewards busyness over impact. One bottleneck at a time: that’s all it takes.

Until next time.