Why Your Team Feels Stuck — and What to Do About It
Over the years I’ve learned that when a team feels stuck because they are constantly busy but not moving fast the answer isn’t more effort but better focus.
I’ve seen talented engineers grind through backlog after backlog, push late nights, automate everything in sight and still, somehow, progress stalls. Features pile up waiting to ship. Bugs reappear. Morale dips. And everyone wonders: What’s going wrong?
Here’s the truth: most software teams don’t have a productivity problem. They have a systems problem.
Let me explain.
The Real Goal of a Software Team
At the end of the day, our job is to deliver value. Not code. Not story points. Not velocity.
Value.
All of the everyday activities like coding, testing, deploying and designing are only meaningful if they deliver value to users or to the business. That’s the real goal. If what we’re doing isn’t moving us toward it, it’s not helping. It’s just motion, not progress.
Every Team Has a Bottleneck. Find Yours.
Every system has a bottleneck that constrains or limits how fast the entire system can go.
In software teams, the bottleneck isn’t always obvious. It could be:
- A single person who reviews all the PRs
- An unreliable staging environment
- A QA process that takes days
- Product decisions that arrive late or unclear
- Deployments that require tribal knowledge and manual intervention
- Onerous compliance checks
Here’s the key insight: if you don’t improve the bottleneck, nothing else matters.
You can hire more engineers, write better code, or build dashboards… but if all that work piles up behind a bottleneck, you’re just increasing the queue. Not the throughput.
Subordinate Everything to the Bottleneck
Let’s say deploys are slow and unpredictable. If that’s your bottleneck, then the team’s focus should shift to improving that part of the system.
That might mean fewer features in the short term. It might mean helping outside your usual responsibilities. It might feel inefficient.
Optimizing parts of the system that aren’t the constraint is local optimization. It makes individuals feel productive, but it doesn’t increase flow. And flow is what matters.
Continuous Improvement Means Chasing the Constraint
Once you relieve one constraint, the bottleneck will move. Maybe now you’re shipping faster, but QA can’t keep up. Or maybe product specs aren’t refined fast enough.
That’s a good sign. It means your system is improving. Your job now? Find the new constraint and focus there. It’s a cycle of discovery, action, and iteration.
Don’t aim for perfection. Aim for continuous progress.
Stop Measuring Motion. Start Measuring Flow.
A common trap for engineering teams is obsessing over personal productivity metrics: commits, stories, tickets closed. Those are motion metrics and are not necessarily related to flow.
Your real metrics should reflect value delivered end-to-end:
- Cycle time from idea to production
- Time to detect and fix defects
- Frequency of successful deployments
- Lead time for changes
That’s the difference between a high-output team and a high-impact one.
In Software, Work in Progress Is Inventory
Here’s a mindset shift that changed how I lead: unfinished work is a liability. Every feature that’s “done but not deployed,” or “written but not reviewed,” is inventory.
And just like in manufacturing, inventory is expensive. It decays. It grows stale. It creates risk and waste.
If we want to move faster, we should focus on reducing WIP and increasing flow. This means shipping smaller pieces more often, with tighter feedback loops.
Final Thought: Think Like a System Designer
As engineering leaders, we often get pulled into tech decisions, people issues, or project firefighting. But the real leverage comes from stepping back and thinking like a system designer.
Our job isn’t to push every team harder but to help the whole system flow better. That means understanding where we’re blocked, aligning everyone around the constraint, and continuously evolving how we work.
It’s not glamorous work, but it’s transformational.
And once you start seeing your team as a system and not just a group of individuals, you’ll never look at software delivery the same way again.