7 posts tagged with "agile"

Your engineering team feels productive. Developers are coding, reviewers are reviewing, testers are testing. The flow board shows impressive activity with tasks moving through stages. Yet somehow, simple features take weeks to reach production, urgent fixes disappear into development black holes, and team velocity feels frustratingly slow despite everyone working hard.

The problem isn't lazy developers, bad code, or inadequate tools. The real culprit is something most teams can't see: invisible work queues that accumulate silently throughout your development pipeline and destroy velocity exponentially. Following Q1: The Principle of Invisible Inventory, these hidden bottlenecks are the root cause of most engineering productivity problems.

Understanding and eliminating invisible queues can transform team performance dramatically—often delivering 5-10x velocity improvements without adding resources or changing technical architecture. The key is learning to see what's hiding in plain sight.

Your engineering team feels busy, backlogs are full, and everyone's calendar is packed. Management celebrates 95% capacity utilization as peak efficiency. Yet somehow, nothing moves fast. Simple features take weeks, urgent fixes get delayed, and team morale drops despite hard work.

This scenario reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about team performance. Following Q3: The Principle of Queueing Capacity Utilization, high utilization doesn't create speed—it destroys it exponentially.

The mathematics are unforgiving: teams operating above 80% capacity utilization enter an exponential queue region where small increases in work create massive delays. Understanding this relationship transforms how we think about team productivity and sustainable velocity.

Fast-moving agile teams face a common challenge: bugs reaching production despite having solid workflows. Even with code reviews, staging environments, and automated deployments, issues still slip through. We experienced this problem firsthand and developed a systematic 4-task approach to reduce production bugs without sacrificing velocity.

The Power of Velocity​

Velocity creates momentum that drives learning and adaptability. In product development, speed enables teams to experiment, learn, and adjust before competitors react, following E3: The Principle of Quantified Cost of Delay. This unlocks two critical advantages: faster learning cycles and precision pivoting capability.

One of the core objectives of ttoss (Terezinha Tech Operations) is to create a modular library system that enables product development teams to become agile, aligning with the Principle D12: The Second Agility Principle. In today's fast-moving development world, the ability to pivot and adapt rapidly is crucial. This principle emphasizes that it's not enough to merely decide to change direction—teams must be able to execute those changes quickly and efficiently.

Queues silently create massive economic waste in product development, following Q2: The Principle of Queueing Waste. Unlike visible manufacturing inventory, product development queues consist of invisible information and work items that accumulate without obvious warning signs.

Understanding these hidden costs is crucial because Q1: The Principle of Invisible Inventory makes queue problems extremely difficult to detect until they severely impact delivery. This article explores seven critical ways queues undermine economic performance and competitive advantage.

If you're new to queue concepts in product development, start with our foundational guide: Understanding Queues: The Invisible Bottleneck in Product Development.

In our previous blog, Agility in Action: Embracing Change Through Decentralized Product Decisions, we explored how decentralized decision-making in product development can enhance agility and responsiveness while maintaining alignment with broader strategic goals. In this post, we’ll delve into how organizations can effectively lay the groundwork to support decentralized product decisions, fostering a culture of autonomy and accountability.